"Discreteness is the better part of value" (Vince Crawford)

 One of the themes of the conference celebrating Vince Crawford (in anticipation of his 75th birthday) is how two of his early famous papers (Crawford and Knoer, 1981 and Kelso and Crawford, 1982)  helped unify matching theory and the theory of markets and competitive equilibria, and thus began to bring matching theory into mainstream economics.

Vince remarked that the unification of matching with the rest of economics also brought discrete (as opposed to continuous) mathematics into the mainstream of economic theory.

He said he had come to realize that "Discreteness is the better part of value."*

*This is of course a play on the common English language expression "Discretion is the better part of valor," which has an indirect and complicated Shakespearean connection, but in common usage is meant to give advice like "Look before you leap."