Part 4

Mathematics, Formalism, and Style

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics: The
Marginalization of Griffith C. Evans
E. Roy Weintraub

The theme of the conference of which this volume is the record con-
trasts a pluralistic interwar economics with a monolithic (neoclassical)
postwar economics. Two conflicting metanarratives are in play in this
idea. The first is the triumphalism of disciplinary progress, a morality
play in which economics finally fulfills the Jevonian promise and
becomes scientific through the use of mathematics. In this view, good
science displaces bad thinking, loose thinking, and the inappropriately
varied argumentation of economics. We may think of Paul Samuelson
(1987) as an exemplar of this way of constructing the history of this
period. The second is a construction of the interwar period as one in
which the healthy variety of economic thought was forced onto the Pro-
crustean bed of neoclassical theory. What emerged by the time of the
neoclassical synthesis was an economics bereft of joy, intelligence, and
humanity. We may think of modern institutionalists, neo-Austrians,
and post-Keynesians as exemplars of this perspective. In either case,
the usual question asked is “Why was pluralism replaced by neoclassi-
cism?” The two metanarratives condition the meta-answers “So that
Goodness would triumph” and “So that Evil would triumph,” respec-
tively. In both cases, however, it is apparently believed that mathemat-
ical theory “pushed out” nonmathematical theorizing in economics.
In this essay, I will not address the “why” question posed previously.
Instead I will look closely at “what happened” in this period by reading
Griffith Conrad Evans in conjunction with the mathematician Vito

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 228 E. Roy Weintraub

Volterra, whose image of mathematics and mathematical life was

rather different from that of the mathematical culture that emerged
after World War II.1 The work of Evans is particularly interesting,
because his ideas were not ignored as being mathematically unsophis-
ticated. Nor was he disconnected from the networks that validate
acceptable contributions to the discipline (Morrey 1983; Rider 1989).
Rather, it is my contention that the marginalization of Evans’s ideas in
the postwar period in economics is better understood as a result of a
change in the conception of what mathematics itself could bring to a
scientific field (see Philip Mirowski and D. Wade Hands’s essay in this
volume). An implication of this reading is that any narrative in the his-
tory of economics of the twentieth century that employs the idea of
“increasing mathematization” should be read with skepticism.

Vito Volterra’s World

In 1959, when Dover Press reprinted Volterra’s Theory of Functionals
and of Integral and Integro-differential Equations, Evans was asked to
write the preface.2 In a three-page note, he commented, “It was my
good fortune to study under Professor Volterra from 1910 to 1912”
(Evans 1959, 1). Evans was twenty-three during the period he men-
tions, and his 1910 Harvard Ph.D. had earned him a Sheldon Traveling
Fellowship, which he used for postdoctoral study at the University of
Rome. This was to be the signal event in his intellectual life, for begin-
ning with his first published paper in 1909, “The Integral Equation of
the Second Kind, of Volterra, with Singular Kernel,” he was connected
to the greatest Italian mathematician of the risorgimento, the intellec-
tual leader of Italian science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Indeed, by 1911 Evans published six papers on functional
analysis and integral equations in Italian in Volterra’s journal, Rendi-
conto Accademia Lincei (Proceedings of the Lincei Academy of Sci-
ence, Physics, Mathematics, and Nature). The interests he developed in
Volterra’s Rome were to be the defining intellectual themes of his math-
ematical life, as his works continued to explore both potential theory
from a perspective of classical mechanics and the theory of functionals.

1. This distinction between the body of mathematical knowledge and the image of math-
ematics is based on the work of Leo Corry (1989, 1996).
2. “Vito Volterra’s World” is taken from the lovely article by Judith Goodstein (1984).

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 229

Along the way, Evans took time to write “The Physical Universe of
Dante” in 1921 and to explain the Italian school of algebraic geometry to
a large audience in “Enriques on Algebraic Geometry” in 1925. His last
work, published in 1961 at age seventy-four, was “Funzioni armoniche
polidrome ad infiniti valori nello spazio, con due curve di ramificazione
di ordine uno.” It is safe to say that his command of the Italian language
and his early connection to the mathematical subjects created by
Volterra linked Evans irrevocably to Volterra, who became his intellec-
tual model. How else are we to read the following gracious and admir-
ing passage?
Volterra was close to the Risorgimento, close to its poets and their
national ideals. In 1919 he was prevailed upon, in spite of a modest
reluctance, to give a lecture on Carducci. I remember the occasion
well because I had the pleasure of translating this, as well as his
exposition of functions of composition, viva voce to an audience of
students. He was also close to the Rinascento, with respect to his sen-
sitivity to art and music and his unlimited scientific curiosity. His
devotion to the history of science and his feeling for archeology
were expressed respectively in the treasures of his personal library
in Rome and in his collection of antiquities in his villa at Ariccia. He
took a most prominent part in the international organizations of sci-
ence and in extending the cultural relations of Italy. His career gives
us confidence that the Renaissance ideal of a free and widely ranging
knowledge will not vanish, however great the pressure of special-
ization. (Evans 1959, 3)
Volterra was the mathematician Evans wished to be; the mentoring
of postdoctoral students is to this day frequently a process of profes-
sional modeling and career and interest shaping. In Evans’s case, this
was to be manifest in his lifelong connection to Italy and to Volterra
himself.
We have the handwritten autobiographical notes that the aged and
failing Evans tried to put together in 1967, fragments of an autobiogra-
phy he could not complete. He said that command of the Italian lan-
guage was not gained early or at home, for as a Harvard student of
“Copy”— Charles Townsend Copeland — he frequently wrote literary
themes in and “could read and enjoy French, German and Latin as well
as English” (Evans 1967). At another place in these disorganized notes
he recalls a series of images from the past and remarks that “towards

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 230 E. Roy Weintraub

the end of the war (Sept. 1918) I was up towards the front, on the Lido
(if I remember correctly), to ‘inspect’ the Italian antiaircraft defenses.
. . . Earlier somewhere near the mountains (Padova?) I remember how-
ever an open prairie, at the front way north of the Po (Battle of the
Piave). Volterra and I were driven up in a big automobile to Padova and
I was taken to the front.” The point is clear. Even as memory and hand-
writing failed and his powers waned, Evans took great pride in the fact
that his work and Volterra’s were connected.
Since I will argue that Evans’s interest in the mathematization of
economics can be informed by Volterra’s, we need to know more about
Volterra.3 Born in 1860, he and his mother were left destitute when his
father died in 1862. They were taken in by relatives in Florence, where
Volterra grew up and was educated. He was very precocious, and his
teachers quickly recognized his remarkable abilities. One teacher, the
physicist Antonio Roiti, intervened in family discussions about launch-
ing Volterra into a commercial career by making the high school boy
his assistant in the physics laboratory at the University of Florence.
There, Volterra won a competition to study mathematics and physics at
the University of Pisa in 1880. After receiving his doctorate in 1882,
with several publications in analysis in hand, he was appointed as assis-
tant to the mathematician Enrico Betti and the following year won a
post as professor of mechanics at Pisa. In 1900 he succeeded Eugenio
Beltrami in the chair of mathematical physics at the University of
Rome (E. Volterra 1976, 86).
In Rome, Volterra established his position as scientific leader-
spokesperson of the new country. His research interests were wide
ranging, and his position in Rome allowed him to stay at the center of
activity:
Rome became the capital of the newly-created state of Italy in 1870.
Under the leadership of Quintano Sella (1827 – 1884), a mathemati-

3. There is no full-length biography of Volterra. There are, however, several biographical

essays, the first of which was an obituary notice of Volterra as a fellow of the Royal Society
by Sir Edmund Whittaker in 1941. This essay, which contains a virtually complete bibliogra-
phy for Volterra, was included in the Dover reprint of Volterra’s book on the theory of func-
tionals (Whittaker 1959) and was the basis of the Volterra entry in The New Palgrave (Gan-
dolfo 1987). One other source of detail can be found in the excellent note by E. Volterra in the
1976 Dictionary of Scientific Biography; that piece has an exceptionally good guide to the sec-
ondary literature on Volterra and his role in Italian science and mathematics. Most of my own
thinking about Volterra has been influenced by Giorgio Israel, who has written extensively on
his life and work. Citations to Israel’s work can be found in the references.

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 231

cian at the University of Turin who exchanged academic life for a

ministerial post in the new government, Rome’s scientific halls came
to life again. With the help of the new Commissioner for Public
Instruction, also a mathematician, Sella brought the cream of Italy’s
scientific faculty to Rome and transformed the capital’s historic Acca-
demia dei Lincei into a genuine National Academy of Science. Sella
and his colleagues built the scientific world that Vito Volterra, then
40, inherited in 1900 when he took up his duties . . . in the nation’s
capital. [Volterra’s] appointment as Senator of the Kingdom five years
later reinforced the Risorgimento tradition of the scientist-statesman
in the service of king and country. (Goodstein 1984, 607–8)
Volterra was concerned with all aspects of scientific understanding.4
He was one of the leaders in making Albert Einstein’s theory of rela-
tivity known, and he was a tireless worker for the public appreciation
of scientific knowledge. In the present era of “science wars” and lost
faith in the very notion of progress, it is difficult to recapture the opti-
mistic world in which science, scientific knowledge, and technology or
applied science were to lead to the new enlightenment. Volterra was the
kind of new man to whom Henry Adams probably referred in “The
Dynamo and the Virgin,” an instantiation of the ideal of the scientific
cum technical polymath. His interests in mathematics, for example, did
not prevent his working at age fifty-five as a lieutenant in the Italian
Corps of Engineers, during which period he also worked at the Aero-
nautics Institute in Rome, carried out aerial warfare experiments in
Tuscany, and tested phonotelemetric devices on the Austrian front
(Goodstein 1984, 610).
As a mathematician of the late nineteenth century, however, Volterra
was from that generation so well represented by the fictitious charac-
ter Victor Jakob in Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (McCorm-
mach 1982). Volterra was a classical analyst whose mathematical work
on functionals grew out of his generalization of differential equations to
the more complex and rich theory of integro-differential equations: His
mathematics articles in 1900 – 1913 include “Sur la stratification d’une
masse fluide en équilibre” (1903), “Sur les équations différentielles du
type parabolique” (1904), “Note on the Application of the Method of
Images to Problems of Vibrations” (1904), and “Sulle equazioni integro-

4. See the very good compilation contained in the five volumes of Volterra’s Opere matem-
atiche (1957).

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 232 E. Roy Weintraub

differenziali” (1909). These topics, however, were not well connected to

the nascent Italian school of algebraic geometry launched by Cremona,
developed by Eugenio Bertini, Corrado Segre, and Giuseppe Veronese,
and brought to fruition by Castelnuovo, Enriques, and Severi. Volterra
was thus more in the tradition of analysts like his mentor Betti and Ulisse
Dini, for the former worked in the intersection of analysis and physics
and the latter was concerned with the rigorous reformulation of math-
ematical analysis. Trained by both men, Volterra’s
own research was more closely linked to the applications. In Vol-
terra’s view it is the peculiar problems deriving from the experimen-
tal sciences that lead to the most fertile and useful theories, while
general questions posited in abstract terms often lack any applica-
tions. This conception of the relationships between analysis and
physics is directly linked to the French physico-mathematical tradi-
tion from Fourier to Poincaré. In fact the need for concreteness
apparent in the fact of thinking of mathematical issues as linked to
physical problems, together with the rigorous training received in
Dini’s school, helped to make Volterra particularly well-suited to
tackling mathematical physics. (Israel and Nurzia 1989, 114)
The Victor Jakob of McCormmach’s 1982 novel, though German,
stands for the same kind of scientist found in many European countries
at that time. Relativity was a great shock to the traditional vision, and
quanta were difficult to domesticate. The crises of atomic theory and
subatomic particles were on the horizon, and the issue of what kind of
theory would promise the best explanation brought into question the
idea of explanation itself. As Israel and Nurzia (1989, 115 – 16) put the
matter:5
The crisis in question stemmed from the discussion going on in the
scientific world of the time concerning the advisability of maintain-
ing the classical mechanic method of explaining natural phenomena
based on the deterministic principle, as well as on the mathematical
tool provided by differential equations. From the strictly mathemat-
ical standpoint this crisis lead to a split between “antiformalists,”
who favored a development of mathematics linked to experimental

5. Let me acknowledge my debt to Giorgio Israel, whose leadership role in interpreting the
history of Italian mathematics has shaped my views here.

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 233

issues, and “formalists,” who preferred development free from all

constraints except formal rigor. The reactions to this crisis by the
world of Italian mathematics varied enormously and a number of
totally conflicting attitudes emerged. On the one hand there were
those, like Volterra, who merely acknowledged the existence of a cri-
sis and sought, if not a solution to the crisis, at least a solid founda-
tion in their scientific practice and in the links between mathematics
and topics of experimental design. . . . [It is for this reason that]
Volterra supported and promoted scientific organizations whose main
purpose was to provide a concrete means of bridging the gap between
pure and applied science.
Although Volterra appears not to have left autobiographical notes or
much material that directly expresses his views of the role of mathe-
matics in applied sciences, we do have a document that, interpreted as
a projection of his own views, may be helpful. This address at the inau-
gural festivities for Rice Institute (which later became Rice University)
apparently has not been noticed by the few economists interested in
Volterra. Delivered in French, the address was translated by Evans and
was titled simply “Henri Poincaré” (V. Volterra 1915). Poincaré had just
died, and Volterra’s tribute to him was both a eulogy and an appreci-
ation for a scientific and personal career, a tribute that well suited
the foundation of a new institute dedicated to science in America. In
attempting to place Poincaré in the history of mathematics and science,
Volterra (1915, 146 – 47) spoke in some detail on the history of the study
of differential equations and function theory in the latter part of the
nineteenth century:
There are two kinds of mathematical physics. Through ancient habit
we regard them as belonging to a single branch and generally teach
them in the same courses, but their natures are quite different. In most
cases the people who are greatly interested in one despise somewhat
the other. The first kind consists in a difficult and subtle analysis con-
nected with physical questions. Its scope is to solve in a complete
and exact manner the problems which it presents to us. It endeavors
also to demonstrate by rigorous methods statements which are fun-
damental for mathematical and logical points of view. I believe that
I do not err when I say that many physicists look upon this mathe-
matical flora as a collection of parasitic plants grown to the great tree
of natural philosophy. . . . The other kind of mathematical physics

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 234 E. Roy Weintraub

has a less analytical character, but forms a subject inseparable from

any consideration of phenomena. We could expect no progress in
their study without the aid which this brings them. Could anybody
imagine the electromagnetic theory of light, the experiments of Hertz
and wireless telegraphy, without the mathematical analysis of
Maxwell, which was responsible for their birth? Poincaré led in both
kinds of mathematical physics. He was an extraordinary analyst, but
he also had the mind of a physicist.
What we have here is Volterra’s projection onto Poincaré of the kinds
of values that he thinks mathematicians ought to exhibit in their work:
not just a mathematical sophistication and power of analytical reason-
ing but a deep and thorough understanding of the scientific basis and
connection of those mathematical ideas. Poincaré, mathematician and
scientist, was Volterra’s paradigmatic intellectual.

Volterra and Economic Theory

The distinction Volterra makes between grounding explanations on the
physical characteristics of the problem and grounding explanations on
mathematico-logico reasoning chains mirrors the distinction between
nonformalist and formalist responses within the mathematics commu-
nity to the crisis of the foundations of mathematics, the paradoxes of set
theory, during the same period. In the case of both physics and set the-
ory, mathematicians could, with the formalist response, ground the
unknown on the known. For mathematics, the grounding was to be an
axiomatization of the settled parts of mathematics, logic, set theory,
and arithmetic, as a basis of both more advanced mathematical theory
and the sciences built on the axiomatized mathematical structures so
created. For Volterra, this formalist response was not rigorous: Scien-
tific reasoning chains could not be based on the free play of ideas,
axioms, or abstract structures. Instead, scientific models had to be
based directly and specifically on the underlying physical reality, a
reality directly apprehended through experimentation and observation
and thus interpersonally confirmable.6
This point is important and bears repeating because the present-day

6. I thank Giorgio Israel for several conversations on this matter and for his insistence on
this distinction. His article “ ‘Rigor’ and ‘Axiomatics’ in Modern Mathematics” (1981) shapes
this discussion.

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 235

identification of rigor with axiomatics obscures the way the terms were
used at the turn of the century. Today we tend to identify the abstract
reasoning chains of formal mathematical work with the notion of rigor
and to set rigor off against informal reasoning chains. Being unrigorous
signifies, today, intellectual informality. This is not the distinction that
was alive in Volterra’s world, however. For Volterra, to be rigorous in
modeling a phenomenon was to base the modeling directly and unam-
biguously on the experimental substrate of concrete results. The oppo-
site of “rigorous” was not “informal” but rather “unconstrained.” To pro-
vide a nonrigorous explanation or model in biology, economics, physics,
or chemistry was to provide a model unconstrained by experimental
data or by interpersonally confirmable observations.
In Volterra’s view, the strategy for approaching scientific explanation
generally was to base reasoning on the most well-developed intellec-
tual framework then extant, the framework of classical mathematical
physics. His clearest statement of this position, of special interest to
economists, was the 1901 article “Sui tentativi di applicazione della
mathematiche alle scienze biologiche e sociale.”7 It is useful to exam-
ine one lengthy passage from this article, in which Volterra defines
what, at the turn of the century, this position entailed for the field of
economics:
The notion of homo oeconomicus which had given rise to much
debate and has created so many difficulties, and which some people
are still loath to accept, appears so easy to our mechanical scientist
that he is taken aback at other people’s surprise at this ideal, schematic
being. He sees the concept of homo oeconomicus as analogous to
those which are so familiar to him as a result of long habitual use. He
is accustomed to idealizing surfaces, considering them to be friction-
less, accepting lines to be nonextendable and solid bodies to be non-
deformable, and he is used to replacing natural fluids with perfect
liquids and gases. Not only is this second nature to him: he also

7. This was Volterra’s inaugural address at the University of Rome for a chair in mathe-
matical physics. It was initially published in the Annurio della Universita Roma and reprinted
in the Giornale degli economisti in 1901. It was translated into French in 1906 by Ludovic
Zoretti as “Les mathématiques dans les sciences biologiques et sociales” (V. Volterra 1906b).
For the reader’s convenience, I will use the English translations of the relevant portions, by
Giogio Israel in several of his works, although I will on occasion make use of an unpublished
translation prepared by Caroline Benforado. Citations to Israel’s translations are followed by
citations to the original source in Volterra in Italian or French.

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 236 E. Roy Weintraub

knows the advantages that derive from these concepts. If the mechan-
ics scholar pursues this study he will see that both in his own science
and in economics everything can be reduced to an interplay of trends
and constraints—the latter restricting the former which react by gen-
erating tensions. It is from this interplay that equilibrium or move-
ment stems, one static and one dynamic, in both these sciences. We
have already referred to the vicissitudes of the idea of force in the
history of mechanics: from the peaks of metaphysics we have
descended to the sphere of measurable things. In economics, for
example, we no longer speak as Jevons did about the mathematical
expression of non-measurable quantities. Even Pareto seems to have
given up his idea of ophelimity, which was the cornerstone of his
original edifice, and is moving to purely quantitative concepts with
indifference curves which so beautifully match the level curves and
equipotential surfaces of mechanics. . . . Lastly our mechanical sci-
entist sees in the logical process for obtaining the conditions for eco-
nomic equilibrium the same reasoning he himself uses to establish
the principle of virtual work, and when he comes across the eco-
nomic differential equations he feels the urge to apply to them the
integration methods which he knows work so well. (Israel 1988, 43
[V. Volterra 1906b, 9 – 10])
Volterra sought to mathematize economics and biology by replacing
metaphysical mathematical analogies with rigorous mathematical
models.8 In economics, however, Volterra published only one official
work, a review of Vilfredo Pareto: “L’economia matematica ed il nuovo
manuale del Prof. Pareto” (1906a). Toward the end of that piece,
Volterra cautioned:
By rigorously solving well-defined problems in a clearly delimited
field, mathematical economics must offer us a secure foundation of
positive data on which to base our judgment as to the procedures to
be followed in various circumstances. But it always leaves open the
discussion of the great moral and political questions to which such

8. Volterra himself, writing in 1901, when he was forty-one years old, could not have fore-
seen that from his mid-sixties until his death at age eighty he would be very concerned with
modeling biological theories and with creating a field of biomathematics. A current search of
the biology literature using the key word “Volterra” will produce hundreds of references to
Volterra models, the most significant of which is the so-called predator-prey model of inter-
species rivalry and population dynamics.

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 237

results should be applied. . . . But to ensure that one can fully justify
the application of mathematics and to obtain the secure results one
seeks, it is first of all necessary that the problems be formulated
clearly and [be] based on definitions and postulates containing noth-
ing vague. It is also essential that . . . the elements taken into consid-
eration are treated as quantities that cannot elude measurement.
(Ingrao and Israel 1990, 164 [V. Volterra 1957, 142, 144])
Ingrao and Israel (1990, 164) believe that Volterra, “despite his initial
enthusiasm” for mathematical economics, “immediately came up against
the difficulties inherent in the theory’s fragile empirical foundations.”
Israel has returned to this view, with respect to Volterra and economics,
on several occasions (Israel 1988, 1991a, 1991b; Israel and Nurzia
1989). His point is simple and clear: Volterra’s view of science and sci-
entific explanation, which entailed rigor in modeling in the sense of
developing economic explanations from mechanical ones, came up
against the nonempirical nature of economics and the impossibility of
erecting mathematical economic theories on any empirical foundation
whatsoever.
The larger issue, however, was that Volterra’s perspective was increas-
ingly unsatisfactory as a solution to the crisis in the natural sciences.
Indeed the entire crisis, at least in physics, turned on the explanatory
power of mechanical reductionism; far from being part of the solution,
reductionist thinking such as Volterra’s was itself the problem. The crisis,
or rather the interlocked crises, of mathematics and physics was resolved
by the formalist position on explanation, whereby mathematical analogy
replaced mechanical analogy and mathematical models were cut loose
from their physical underpinnings in mechanics. The result was that in
the first decades of the twentieth century a rigorous argument was recon-
ceptualized as a logically consistent argument instead of as an argument
that connected the problematic phenomenon to a physical phenomenon
by use of empirical data. Propositions were henceforth “true” within the
system considered because they were consistent with the assumptions
instead of being “true” because they could be grounded in “real phe-
nomena.” We can leave Volterra here and refocus on Evans, for a his-
torian of economics can construct Evans out of these Volterra-emergent
themes.

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 238 E. Roy Weintraub

Evans: The Mathematician and His Interests

In 1912 Evans became one of the first two teachers at the Rice Institute
in Houston. As the institute transformed itself into Rice University,
Evans lent it his increasing renown and intellectual strength and his
mathematical visibility. Today Rice recognizes his role in its program
of Griffith C. Evans Instructorships in Mathematics, intended for
promising young mathematicians. Evans’s resignation from Rice in
1933 was sufficiently noteworthy that the Houston Chronicle wrote a
story about it that recounted his career there. During his twenty-one
years at Rice and in Houston, he had made his mark. After his promo-
tion to full professor in 1916, he was married in 1917 to Isabel Mary
John, daughter of state court judge Robert A. John of Houston, who
was general counsel of the Texas Company for many years (Houston
Chronicle 1973). Isabel John was a great-granddaughter of Sam Hous-
ton, and her niece married Price Daniel, who became a Texas governor.
Evans, Boston Brahmin, was nothing if not well connected to the first
families of Texas.
Newspaper clippings found in the Rice University Archives provide
a glimpse of Evans’s diverse tastes and interests. On 6 May 1915, the
Houston Chronicle (1915a) reported on a lecture Evans gave on prag-
matism that was the first of three lectures on “scientific aspects of phi-
losophy.” Evans began by addressing the gospel of Tolstoy and then
suggested that “in regard to such basic [metaphysical] questions almost
all thinkers have a basis of optimism. Their query is not ‘are things
right?’ but ‘how is it that all things are right?’ and in their researches
they seem to trust to what may be called the lucky star of humanity,
injecting their personal interest in the outcome into the problem itself.”
Evans went on to discuss William James and his approach to settling or
at least posing philosophical issues. He concluded that “we have no
reason to suppose that all possible phenomena can be expressed by
means of any finite system of terms. Instead of this, we may expect
that, no matter how complete our system of conceptual terms may be,
we shall find facts that require its continual extension. That is what we
mean when we say that there will always be novelty in the world, and
always new problems for the genius of man to attack and solve.”
One week later, the Houston Chronicle (1915b) reported on Evans’s
talk on aesthetics, the second in the series of lectures. Evans began by
suggesting that an important element in the discussion of art and aes-

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 239

thetics was the determination of how wide the aesthetic net should be
cast. He suggested that knowledge of the aesthetic issues in mathe-
matics could cast light on the general problem. The inability of math-
ematics to determine which geometry is “correct” leads to a position
“that an arbitrary element enters into that most exact of sciences, math-
ematics. . . . The nature of mathematics is that it is entirely arbitrary,
and its use is that in its growth, by the formation of arbitrary concepts,
it limits itself more or less unconsciously to those who have mirrors in
actual life. It is therefore a ‘human interest’ story.” Beyond the techni-
cal skills required to be a mathematician, “other qualities of a far more
subtle sort, chief among them . . . imagination, are necessary.” He cites
Benedetto Croce with approval and remarks that “art is expressed in
intuition, that is, the synthesis of concrete imaginative elements. It is a
spiritual, theoretical activity.”
The third Evans lecture on the scientific aspects of philosophy was
reported in the Houston Chronicle on 28 January 1916. He began this
lecture on rationalism by noting that “each of the earlier two lectures
ended with a problem which could not be solved in terms of the meth-
ods proper to the subject of the lecture itself.” Evans framed the issues
as fundamentally epistemological; paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, he
asked, “How is metaphysics possible? How can we hope to know any-
thing about metaphysical questions?” Kant further asked whether nat-
ural science is possible in the sense that natural laws are not laws of
experience but creations of the human mind. Evans remarks that “the
axioms of mathematics are merely the forms in which sensations must
be presented to us in order to become mental representations, they are
meshes through which our intuitions are formed, and derive their neces-
sity from that fact. . . . Similarly the laws of the pure sciences of nature
are merely the laws of the understanding. By means of them nature
becomes intelligible. And they derive their certainty from that reason.”
These three lectures, apparently never published, aid our under-
standing of Evans’s perspective on the role of mathematics as a human
activity and thus an activity connected to other human activities, like
Alfred Marshall’s “study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.”
Evans is an end-of-the-nineteenth-century rationalist, a Harvard prag-
matist who believes in reason with a human face and a person’s capac-
ity to understand the world in which he or she lives. For many mathe-
maticians and physicists, the earth had moved in the 1890s. Evans was
writing on the eve of World War I, a time when civilization and its

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 240 E. Roy Weintraub

products would be shaken. There is no trace in Evans’s own work, how-

ever, of the intellectual crisis that rocked turn-of-the-century physicists
and mathematicians: Evans’s scientific views remained intact.
Evans’s war career was recorded in the Houston newspapers. The
Houston Post (1918) noted his appointment as “scientific attaché” to the
American embassy in Rome and observed that he was doing “research
with the American Aviation Service. He was in Italy with the American
and allied forces studying actual conditions. . . . He has been in war
work in France, England, and Italy, . . . his ability as a linguist adding
to his proficiency as a scientist in foreign countries.” The paper fol-
lowed this story with another in 1919 on Harvard’s offer of a faculty
post to Evans, which he turned down after his demobilization to return
to Houston.
We can reconstruct Evans’s career and interests after his return to
Houston based on three articles he prepared for the Rice Institute Pam-
phlet. The first appeared in 1921 in a series of seven lectures observing
the six hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante. Evans contributed
a substantial article titled “The Physical Universe of Dante.” This essay
best portrays Evans as an unusual scholar, although he acknowledges
the help of Volterra and other individuals in Rome, as well as his own
father and a Professor Tyler of Boston. In the essay, Evans examines
the context in which Dante wrote, situating him in a particular frame-
work of knowledge about the physical universe. With a sharp command
of the original source material, as well as wide-ranging knowledge of
the secondary literature in the history of science, Evans discusses the
issues of the calendar and astronomy to locate the sources of allusions
and references in Dante’s poetry and even delves into astrology as an
interpretive system for comprehending the nature of Dante’s physical
universe. Evans continues his discussion of science with observations
on biology and physics, together with some observations about the
“discovery” of petroleum! He comments, for example, that “a striking
error in Dante’s notion of the civilized world is that of making the
length of the Mediterranean extend for 90 degrees of longitude — per-
haps an intentional remodeling of geography to fit allegorical interpre-
tations” (103). This is connected to Evans’s subsequent discussion of
the geometrical properties of the earth’s surface: “Witness the geodesy
of the Third Tractate of the ‘Convivio,’ where the relative positions of
poles, equator, and elliptic are discussed, and the relation of day to
night. Here incidentally the radius of the earth is given as 3250 miles”

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 241

(103 – 4). Evans then continues with discussions of the relation of

Dante’s references to the heavenly motions to the then popular theories
of the variable apparent motions of the heavens created “out of a system
of uniform circular motions about centers themselves also moving uni-
formly” (107). Evans concludes by building a comprehensive model of
the universe and the motion of the stars, the sun, the planets, and the
moon from the medieval conceptions and those present in Dante’s own
discussion.
But in the final two paragraphs, Evans takes a delicious Whiggish
turn, ending with the following:
It is time perhaps for science to grow beyond the need of a mechan-
ical interpretation. . . . Whenever there is one mechanical explana-
tion, the transformation theory of dynamics tells us that there is
more than one, and of these the simplest, as Einstein has shown us,
is the most complicated. On the other hand, when we try to classify
the phenomena that admit of mechanical explanation, and Professor
G. D. Birkhoff tells us that any system of ordinary differential equa-
tions is nothing but a set of dynamical equations, and vice versa, it
becomes evident that the future of science may soar farther from our
own restricted mechanical point-of-view than ours has risen above
the quaint interpretations of the Middle Ages. (117)
This essay followed a 1920 essay by Evans in the same pamphlet
titled “Fundamental Points of Potential Theory.” The essay was written
to commemorate “three lectures delivered at the Rice Institute in the
Autumn of 1919, by Senator Vito Volterra, Professor of Mathematical
Physics and Celestial Mechanics, and Dean of the Faculty of Sciences
of the University of Rome” (181).
Evans’s essay is “a study of the Stieltjes integral in connection with
potential theory” (252). He demonstrates the relation of the potential
function thus defined to the integral form of Poisson’s equation, which
applies to any distribution of mass. Evans’s object is the set of general
forms of Green’s theorem as applied to polarization vectors and solu-
tions of Poisson’s equation. The essay concludes with a study of the
appropriate boundary value problems for harmonic functions and the
general open region. The investigations represent “studies originated in
1907, when it first became apparent to me that the theory was unnec-
essarily complicated by the form of the Laplacian operator” (253).
The third article by Evans in the Rice Institute Pamphlet appeared in

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 242 E. Roy Weintraub

1926. In this collection of five lectures observing the three hundredth

anniversary of the death of Francis Bacon, Evans contributed “The
Place of Francis Bacon in the History of Scientific Method.” This
essay captures Evans’s own philosophical ambivalence. As a resident
intellectual cum philosopher/historian of science, even though an ama-
teur, Evans was obliged to contribute to this set of popular lectures on
Bacon. Although as a mathematician Evans had no patience for
Bacon, as a respectful scholar he knew he should take Bacon seriously
because of the esteem in which Bacon was held by such figures as Gott-
fried Leibniz, John Locke, David Hume, and Kant. But he thought
Bacon was not worth taking seriously; hence the essay’s implicit
dilemma.
Evans “solves” this problem by walking away from it. He begins by
asking, “If there had been no Bacon, would the future of science have
been essentially different, or would its development have been materi-
ally slower?” (73) He answers immediately, “I think we may give the
negative answer to both these questions.” He then examines a number
of fields that could have claimed Bacon in a line of paternity, as it were.
In none of them does Bacon play a role. Neither physics, nor astron-
omy, nor atomistic or relativistic theories, nor theories of electricity
and magnetism, nor mechanics “pass[es] close to Bacon” for, “given
Bacon’s neglect of mathematics, it is not surprising that these mathe-
matical methods go back on a line which Bacon does not grasp”
(75 – 76). Certainly, too, in neither evolution, nor biology, nor chemical
investigations did Bacon take much scientific part.
Evans states that it is not in science itself that Bacon deserves to be
recalled. Instead, Evans locates him in a line with the great “skeptic
Montaigne,” for whom reason is “a dangerous tool, and he who uses it
loses himself along with his dogmatic enemies” (84):
Francis Bacon believes that he provides the way of putting in order
the universe which Montaigne has left in such an unhappy state. He
devises a method which he thinks will be easy to apply and will
increase the domain of science enormously and rapidly. . . . Bacon
tends to diminish the importance of the imagination in arriving at
scientific truth. . . . What is to be the real method of turning natural
history into science is the systematic use of the reason in the way in
which Bacon explains . . . as an induction with the help of experi-
ment. According to Bacon’s idea it is possible to arrive at a scientific

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 243

theory by a process of exclusion, more or less as an argument by

reductio ad absurdum is used in mathematics. . . . In other words,
hypotheses are to be eliminated successively with reference to fact
or experiment until only the hypothesis which must be true remains.
(84 – 87)
Evans goes on with this discussion but returns to the point that
clearly gnaws at him, that there is no place for the imagination.
“Knowledge is to be advanced by the invention of new concepts. But
what makes a concept significant?” (89) Evans here takes his stand
with Leibniz and, in what is certainly his own voice, remarks, “It is bril-
liance of imagination which makes the glory of science” (90). One sus-
pects that Evans believed Bacon had a deficient imagination.

Evans among the Econ

At a first pass, we can locate Evans’s connection to economics in the
sequence of articles that led up to his 1930 book. These five works all
appeared in regular mathematics publications and essentially operated
in the same fashion: They called the attention of mathematicians to
interesting problems in an applied discipline.
The first article was titled “A Simple Theory of Competition” and
appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1922. In it, Evans
postulated a rudimentary theory of competition in terms of specific
functional forms. Basing his discussion on Augustin Cournot’s volume
and developing it in terms of the profits of several competitors, Evans
examines a number of special cases. From a modern point of view, the
interesting feature of Evans’s discussion is that he works with quadratic
cost functions and something akin to a linear demand function. His
analysis operates entirely independently of a decision calculus for
either producers or purchasers. With the three coefficients of the cost
functions and the two coefficients of the demand function, a variety of
special cases can emerge under different assumptions. Evans modifies
his discussion by introducing more producers, different kinds of taxes,
and other specifications of the cost curve. He ends by noting that the
restriction to functions of a single variable is mathematically inessen-
tial. The deeper question is, “What is retained when we remember that
what a producer is interested in is not to make his momentary profit a
maximum, but his total profit over a period of time, of considerable

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 244 E. Roy Weintraub

extent, with reference to cost functions which are themselves changing

as a whole with respect to time?” (379). Evans notes that this leads to
problems in the calculus of variations and “can refer only to his lecture
courses for a further treatment of this point-of-view. Nevertheless it
seems the most fruitful way that a really theoretical economics may be
developed” (380).
The next article appeared in 1924 in the American Mathematical
Monthly. Called “The Dynamics of Monopoly,” it picked up the theme
developed in the 1922 paper of “change over time.” Evans assumes, for
a monopolist, an interest in making total profits as large as possible over
a time interval. With an initial price and a final price, Evans sets up the
problem of maximizing the appropriate integral. Following the state-
ment of the problem, which refers back to Luigi Amoroso’s 1921 dis-
cussion of economic dynamics, Evans states that “an editor of the Monthly
— Professor Bennett — has said that one should be obliged to present a
certificate of character before being initiated into the mysteries of the
calculus of variations, to which study our present investigation belongs,
since its fascination is so great that neophytes seek to introduce it into
problems which would otherwise be perfectly simple” (78–79).
Evans then makes the matter of the dynamic behavior a sequence of
discussions of special cases. He develops what he calls the Cournot
monopoly price as one kind of solution associated with an appropriate
end value. Most interesting to a modern reader, however, is his con-
cluding section, which notes that “one purpose in writing the present
paper, as well as the previous one, has been to show [that] the wide
range of problems suggested are solvable by a moderate mathematical
equipment, and to encourage others to read in a direction that cannot
but be fruitful” (83). A footnote to this sentence reads, “For example,
the works of Cournot, Jevons, Walras, Pareto, and Fisher. Those who
can read Italian will find interesting the volume of Amoroso, already
cited.”
One begins to see in this discussion the applied mathematician Evans
finding in the field of economics some problems to solve that had
already been treated using what a mathematician would consider prim-
itive mathematical techniques. For Evans, behavioral rules and theo-
ries do not appear, nor does a theory of price formation in markets.
Rather, there emerges a discussion of output levels associated with dif-
ferent interrelationships among producers under a variety of cost curve
assumptions.

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 245

Evans’s first 1925 article, “Economics and the Calculus of Varia-

tions,” appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences (1925a). It is a very different kind of article in that it presents a
theory of the interconnection between economic modeling procedures
and the calculus of variables as a mathematical structure. Evans oper-
ates in this work at a quite different level of generality from that in the
essays on competition and monopoly, presenting a general systems
vision, as it were. The paper begins:
The writer is not the first to venture to state a general theory in math-
ematical terms of a subject which is not unfairly regarded as com-
pounded somewhat indefinitely of psychology, ethics, and chance.
Being more than a mere mixture, however, it is equally fair to say
that a separate analysis may apply; indeed, in Economics we are
interested in the body of laws or deductions which may be inferred
from convenient or arbitrary economic hypotheses, however they
may be founded — in fact, fiction, statistics, habits or morals — what
we will. This process of inference, if it is worthy of the effort, may be
made mathematical. (90 – 91)
Evans develops the notion of an abstract economy by dividing an
economic system into a set of n compartments and letting dxi /dt be “the
rate at which the specific commodity or service i is produced in its com-
partment” (91). Defining a rate at which this commodity comes from
the compartment and a rate at which it is present within the compart-
ment and noting that there is a balance among these three rates and an
input-output accounting identity at work, Evans defines a general sys-
tem of economics as a set of M laws linking the behavior of the flow
variables over time. Evans develops the flows and the balances over
time in the framework of the calculus of variations, examining money
and the equation of exchange in this context.
He concludes, “It may be remarked that the relation of economics to
the calculus of variations is not accidental, nor the result of the gener-
alization from previously found differential equations, since it is in the
nature of an economics system that there should be a striving for a
maximum of some sort” (94 – 95). In this article, Evans remarks in a
footnote that “C. F. Roos, in an article not yet published, treats a . . .
problem of a similar nature.” Charles Roos was, of course, Evans’s stu-
dent at Rice and one of the founding members of the Econometrics
Society.

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 246 E. Roy Weintraub

This article on the calculus of variation and economics does not

solve a particular problem but rather frames a conceptual one: how to
model an economy or economic system. What Evans accomplishes
here, although it stands outside usual schemes, is a dynamic input-
output model of an economic system. Moreover, this dynamic model is
mathematically coherent and rich enough to permit some inferences.
Evans’s remarkable “Mathematical Theory of Economics” (1925b),
which appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly, was originally
read at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Association
in Washington, D.C., in 1924.
One interest in research in the Mathematical Theory of Economics
is that the necessary preparation for it either in mathematics or in
economics is not so great as for theoretical research say in physics or
chemistry, or even in biology. . . . It may well be that it is the lack of
mathematical technique among economists which has prevented the
theoretical side of the subject from developing as rapidly as the
wealth of books and papers, devoted to it, would seem to indicate. On
the other hand, if we turn to the trained mathematicians, we find
them mainly engrossed in the more romantic fields of physics, chem-
istry, and engineering, except in the case of the extensive analysis of
statistics, where contact is made with kinetic theory on the one hand,
and social and biological data on the other. (104 – 5)
In the next several sections, Evans lays out Cournot’s views on monop-
oly and competition and those of Irving Fisher, more or less restating
the results of his earlier articles in the American Mathematical Monthly.
In addition, he refers to the calculus of variations argument and notes
Roos’s (1925) article, which appears shortly thereafter in the American
Journal of Mathematics.
Of interest, however, is the remarkable concluding section, “General
Points of View.” Here we begin to see why Evans was to be such an out-
lier among economists. He writes:
There is no such measurable quantity as “value” or “utility” (with all
due respect to Jevons, Walras, and others) and there is no evaluation
of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”; or more flatly,
— there is no such thing. In a way, material happiness has to do with
a maximum of production and a minimum of unpleasant labor;
though again no such thing is realizable theoretically without an

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 247

arbitrary definition of a composite function which is to take on a

maximum value; and in the composition of this function the labor
and profit of various classes of people enter capriciously. One might
define a ratio of weighted production divided by weighted amounts
of labor, according to classes, and study what sort of lash, economic
or otherwise, would serve to impel Society towards this limit; but the
choice of weights would depend essentially on whether the chooser
is born a Bolshevik or a member of the Grand Old Party! Compro-
mises carry us into the field of ethics.
That does not mean that such study is unprofitable. Far from it.
How otherwise are we to evaluate the schemes of reformers and
prophets, major and minor? Moreover the groundwork of such stud-
ies must be made well in advance, before there is any direct occasion
for them; otherwise they will fail us when we do need them. There is
not only an opportunity for mathematics and economics, but even a
duty; and on mathematicians in an unusual degree lies the responsi-
bility for the economic welfare of the world. (110)
Thus, certainly by 1925, five years before his book on mathematics
for economics, Evans has written himself outside the usual concerns of
economists. He is dismissive, if not contemptuous, of the intellectual
framework upon which neoclassical analysis had been founded: the
subjective theory of value. For Evans, economists, even mathematical
economists like William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and most cer-
tainly Marshall, were on the wrong track and had little to contribute if
they believed in the analysis of value or utility. Evans here takes on the
crudest of materialist positions, choosing to operate his analysis strictly
in terms of production and labor quantities because for him, as for
Volterra, these ideas could be linked to measurable quantities. For an
anti-Marxist patrician of an old Boston family, this position is inter-
esting indeed.
Just in case economists did not get the point, Evans, writing in 1929
in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, reviewed the
1927 edition of Cournot’s book. Beginning his review by citing Mar-
shall and John Stuart Mill on Cournot’s genius, he proceeds to contrast
Cournot’s great understanding and insight with more recent treatments
in mathematical economics. He does this by comparing a “Cournot
[who] is almost alone in holding to a clear realization of the difference
between measurable and nonmeasurable quantities” with more recent

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 248 E. Roy Weintraub

authors who do not (269). Evans writes that “one recent book on the
mathematical principles of economics, typical of many others, builds
its theory on the following basis: Write U(x, y, . . .) for an algebraic
function of measurable quantities.” This author’s utility discussion is
linked to changes in utility and therefore satisfaction. Evans notes,
“Apparently this other author is unaware that he is begging the ques-
tion. If loci of indifference are expressed by Pfaffian differential equa-
tions it does not follow that there is any function of which these are the
level loci for such equations are not necessarily completely integrable.
The question is not of names, but of existence. These supposedly gen-
eral treatments are much more special than their authors imagined”
(270). Evans’s contempt for the misguided mathematical economist is
quite open: He identifies the economist who said these things as “Bow-
ley, Mathematical Groundwork of Economics, Oxford, 1924.”
Thus, by the time Evans releases his book, Mathematical Introduc-
tion to Economics, into the world of economists in 1930, he is on record
in print as believing that Jevons and his school, which of course means
Marshall, and Walras and his school, which of course means Pareto,
H. L. Moore, and virtually everyone else writing in mathematical terms,
are entirely misguided for basing analysis on a nonquantifiable theory
of value. Moreover, Evans has sneered in public at the mathematical
competence of the author in England, A. L. Bowley, who had written
the basic text in mathematics for economics.

Mathematical Introduction to Economics

It is, of course, primarily for his book Mathematical Introduction to
Economics (1930) than Evans is remembered by economists. Written
while he was still at Rice University, Evans’s book represents an
unusual conglomeration of topics and perspectives.
The first several chapters, on monopoly, units of measurement, price,
cost and demand, and taxation, take up themes and specific examples
Evans had introduced in his earlier publications on approaches of
mathematics to economic problems. These chapters all have the Evans
“hand” on them in their use of specific functional forms and in their
deliberate avoidance of behavioral assumptions and statistical work.
These analyses reflect an interest in specifying the market outcomes
and developing relationships among variables to generate realistic or
comprehensible special cases. Chapters 6 – 9, on tariffs, rent, rates of

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 249

exchange, the theory of interest, and the equation of exchange and

price level indices, operate at a slightly higher level of systematic abstrac-
tion, although for Evans, the treatment of these issues proceeds exactly
the same as in the case of sales in a particular market.
It is, however, in chapters 10 – 12 that Evans makes his stand against
the usual argumentation of economic theory. In chapter 10, for exam-
ple, he states that “we must adopt a cautious attitude toward com-
prehensive theories.” Arguing that although it is a temptation “to gen-
eralize a particular set of relations which has been found useful, by
substituting variables for all the constants in the equation,” he notes
that “it may be questioned as to whether we have added to anything but
our mathematical difficulties.” It is not that he wishes to “abandon the
search for general theories” but rather that “we shall gain much if
we can formulate our propositions in such a way as to make evident
the limitations of the theory itself.” In a nutshell, “our endeavor then
should be to make systematic discussions of several groups of economic
situations, as theoretical investigations, and bring out the respective
hypotheses which separate these groups” (110 – 11).
Evans uses this general discussion as a prelude to chapter 11’s attack
on economists’ (Jevons’s, Pareto’s, Walras’s) use of utility theory. He
argues that those “authors with whom we are concerned . . . affirm that
the use of mathematics need not be confined to [actual quantities of
commodities and money] but may also be applied to the order relations
among the subjective quantities” (116). Those subjective quantities
involve pleasure, satisfactions, and vanities. Evans refocuses his attack
on utility theory through the integrability problem — the impossibility
of building indifferent surfaces from local optimization solutions.
Referring to what is probably the core set of intellectual principles
that guided Evans in his thinking, he remarks that
a mathematical critique similar to that just adopted is widely explic-
able, and is more penetrating than an analysis in terms of loose con-
cepts where the words themselves, by their connotations, may apply
theorems of existence which are untenable. . . . the concepts of
beauty, truth and good are analogous to those which we have been
discussing. In every situation, there is something not of the best —
some ugliness, some falsity or some evil — and so the practical judg-
ment which is to be a basis of action is not “what situation is absolutely
correct?” but “which of several situations is best?” The problem

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 250 E. Roy Weintraub

involved is the comparison of two or more groups of elements of

esthetic character. By the possibility of making a judgment at all is
implied the fact that between two such groups, which are not too
widely separated or which are simple in the sense of containing few
enough elements, one can assign greater value to the one than to the
other. (121 – 22)
Evans takes the integrability argument to mean that “we can devise
an approximate value function as a scale for small changes of the vari-
ables, but cannot extend it beyond a merely local field unless we are
willing to make some transcendental hypothesis about the existence of
such a function. . . . In experimental terms we are accordingly not per-
mitted to use such terms as beauty, good and truth with any absolute
significance; comparative adjectives would be better, or truer and these
only as applied to situations which did not differ widely or differed only
in one or two elements” (122).
The grand unifying theory of Birkhoff’s aesthetic measure and the
unification of value theory of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s mathemati-
cal psychics are not for Evans. Evans the mathematician, interested in
potential functions and integral equations, is rooted clearly and dis-
tinctly in the physical phenomena of measurable entities. If one can
build a theory out of these bricks, well and good. But if the mathemat-
ics precludes the building, one must not rush ahead and assume the
building is already there.

Evans Marginalized
The Griffith Conrad Evans Papers at the University of California,
Berkeley’s, Bancroft Library contain some materials related to Evans’s
view of his book and his attempts to manage its reception. The papers
include, for example, an undated handwritten letter, probably to his edi-
tor H. J. Kelly at McGraw-Hill, about his desire to have Roos review
the book for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. He
also suggests that Professor Snyder of Yale thinks the book can be used
“in connection with their mathematical club. Professor Kellogg thinks
he can use it in connection with tutorial work. In general the use as a
text must come slowly, since such courses are just beginning in the uni-
versities — Cornell and Yale are the only ones (besides Rice, where I
have four students).” He remarks that “I have not read Hotelling’s

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 251

review. It would probably irritate me, if he did not see what the book is
for. . . . It is the only book in the subject with exercises which the stu-
dent can practice on, and the only book in English which consistently
keeps to a uniform level of mathematical preparation using mathemat-
ics correctly. . . . The level of training is that which the engineer pos-
sesses. . . . It seems to me that you rule out your most important clien-
tele, namely the large number of engineers who usually buy your
books.”
The papers also contain two letters written by Henry Schultz at
Chicago on 24 April 1931 and 8 May 1931, the first of which replies to
a 20 April letter from Evans. It appears that the exchange developed
out of Evans’s learning that Schultz was to write a review and seems to
be based on a draft of the review sent to Evans. It also appears that
Schultz was concerned that Evans assumed too high a level of mathe-
matical sophistication for most students of economics, although he
does express admiration for Evans’s treatment of a number of topics, in
particular the dynamic problems approached through the calculus of
variations. In a very interesting remark in his first letter, Schultz says,
“Frankly, I am puzzled by your attitude. In my naivete, I assumed that
Volterra and Pareto had reached an understanding on this question.”
After giving the reference to the 1906 exchange between Volterra and
Pareto, Schultz asks, “Am I wrong? Are Pareto’s revised views on util-
ity and indifference curves — a revision which was necessitated by
Volterra’s criticism — still open to objection? If so, what is it? I should
greatly appreciate further light on this question.” He concludes the let-
ter with, “I am awaiting your reply to my query regarding Pareto’s
mature views on utility.”
Evans’s reply is not to be found in the papers, but Schultz’s letter of
8 May 1931 begins, “I am glad to get your letter of May 2 and to find
that we are beginning to understand each other.” Schultz refers to a
story that Evans must have told in the 2 May letter about his “experi-
ence with a chemical firm.” Schultz, in counterpoint, describes his own
experience with data and fitting curves to data and concludes, “It
appears that any attempt to get light on coefficients of production or
business methods is at this stage likely to be unsuccessful.”
It thus appears that Evans’s views of utility involve issues of mea-
sures of utility or value. The nonquantifiable and the nonmeasurable
were hardly fit subjects for mathematical investigations from Evans’s
point of view. To one trained in his manner in mathematics, a mathe-

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 252 E. Roy Weintraub

matical theory of value and utility would necessarily be nonrigorous.

Rigor, as discussed previously, is associated with the connection of the
conceptual categories to an underlying physical reality. Rigor most
decidedly did not mean for Evans what it meant for later mathemati-
cians, namely, something derivable from an axiomatization in a formal
or formally consistent manner. The mathematician and mathematical
economist Evans of 1930 is thus well connected to the Evans who stud-
ied with Volterra before World War I and to the Volterra who aban-
doned economics in its nonrigorous infancy just after the turn of the
century.
Despite Evans’s marginal position within the community of mathe-
matical economists, it should be noted that the Evans Papers confirm
his participation in the nascent subcommunity of mathematical econo-
mists. Roos, at Cornell in the 1930s, had been Evans’s student at Rice.
When Irving Fisher, Ragnar Frisch, and Roos wrote to solicit organiza-
tional support for the creation of the Econometrics Society, Evans
replied almost immediately with his support and with suggestions of
individuals outside the United States to write, including Ewald Schams,
Jan Tinbergen, Wassily Leontief, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan. He was
reading the works of economists who used mathematics whether they
wrote in French, Italian, or German, and his reading lists suggest a
broad intellect interested in keeping his courses up to date and his stu-
dents well informed.
Given Evans’s views on the state of mathematical economics and the
basis on which neoclassical theory had been constructed, the early
reviews of the book were predictable. Writing in Economica in 1931,
R. G. D. Allen concluded, “The book contains many instructive appli-
cations of mathematics to economic problems, but, as a whole, it is not
a convenient introduction to mathematical economics either for the
pure mathematician or for the economist. The latter will be deterred by
the lengthy algebraic development and, in the later chapters, by the dif-
ficult mathematical analysis used; the former, after a general survey of
the work of Cournot, Jevons, and Walras, will be well advised to pro-
ceed, at once, to the complete analysis of Pareto” (109). And the fol-
lowing year in the Economic Journal, another reviewer (Bowley 1932)
noted:
This book is interesting as showing a mathematician’s approach to
economics . . . but since there is no clear thread of economic theory

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 253

in the treatment and no attempt at a general theory of any wide

region of economics, a mathematician without economic knowledge
will not obtain any thorough grasp of that subject; while the trained
economics student will find the mathematical treatment difficult and
in many places of a quite advanced level, while he will be bothered
by the unelucidated mathematical character of the solutions. In fact,
the appendix to Marshall’s Principles of Economics is far more use-
ful to the student of economics, quite apart from more recent stud-
ies on mathematical economics. (93 – 94)
Considering that the reviewer was A. L. Bowley, how could Evans have
expected a different reception?
Evans was not easily put off. In 1932 he published “The Role of
Hypothesis in Economic Theory,” one of the most interesting and pre-
scient critiques of the foundation of neoclassical theory. This essay had
previously been presented at a joint session of the Econometrics Soci-
ety and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on
1 January 1932.
The neutrality and generality of the title of Evans’s article belie its
subversive intent. He begins by making a distinction between a natural
and a theoretical science, a difference that “lies essentially in the pres-
ence or absence of a free spirit of making hypotheses and definitions.”
In a theoretical science, as opposed to a natural one, definitions
“become constructive rather than denotive and hypotheses are intro-
duced and tried out, in order to see what sort of results may be deduced
from them” (321). Evans then examines “the degree to which we may
speak of a theoretical economics, and the extent to which we may call
it mathematical.”
Evans develops his argument by suggesting that “the main object of
economic theory is to make hypotheses, to see what relations and
deductions follow from such hypotheses, and finally, by testing the con-
sequences in comparison with the facts of existing economic systems,
to describe them in terms of those hypotheses” (322). His illustration is
the concept of demand. He presents five separate demand functions, all
of which embed specific assumptions or hypotheses. For example, one
demand function might have quantity as a function of price alone, while
a second might have quantity depending on both price and the rate of
chance of price. In modern parlance, Evans is suggesting that we have
a great deal of freedom in specifying the demand function.

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 254 E. Roy Weintraub

The main line of argument follows quickly: “A simple concept in

economics has been that of utility . . . but underneath such a definition
there must lie assumptions, tacit or explicit. Even though we are not
willing to assume that this psychic quantity is directly measurable, if
we are to use it in equations we have nevertheless to be able to add
small increments of it” (322).
He proceeds to suggest that in standard analysis “we leave out of
account the question as to whether or not utility is itself measurable, but
suppose that there is a quantity associated with it which is measurable
and whose measure we may call an index of utility” (323). Evans con-
tinues by noting that a situation described by a vector x1, y1, z1 is not
compared directly with a second situation x2, y2, z2 but, rather, that if I is
the utility index of one state, we examine dI as decomposed into the x,
y, and z changes as the equation dI = Xdx + Ydy + Zdz. Evans argues
that this is the actual comparison problem. Consequently, one must
recapture I from this equation: “In other words, we can build up an
index function by means of the curves of indifference. But if the state
of the system is given by three or more numbers, we also know that
there does not exist in general such an index function. The expression
of this fact in mathematical terms is the statement that an equation like
Xdx + Ydy + Zdz = 0 is not completely integrable. If we wish to have a
utility function, we must introduce some hypothesis on the coefficients
x, y, z.”
The problem is that, mathematically, such a process requires “that
certain relations already hold between the variables x, y, z; and they are
no longer independent. . . . Hence we must assume that all our situa-
tions relative to a utility function must not contain more than two inde-
pendent variables, or else we must introduce directly a postulate of
integrability. It seems an arbitrary limitation” (323 – 24).
Evans noted that economists have sometimes argued that within the
system there are, in fact, sufficient relations among the variables to
solve this problem. “Sufficient” in this case means that, for economists,
there are as many equations as there are unknowns. On this point
Evans remarks, “It is absolutely no check on the correctness of state-
ment of the problem that the number of equations is the required num-
ber.” He footnotes this remark with the comment, “This apparently is
not a unanimous opinion among economists.” His footnote goes on to
state that Schultz, in reviewing Evans’s book, smuggles integrability
into the assumptions of the problem. In terms of comparing states,

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 255

Evans asks, referring to Schultz’s argument, “How many individuals,

for instance, can decide, without reference to process, which of the two
situations he desires — peace, or justice, in China?” Evans concludes
this discussion of utility by saying that if we are to “distinguish
between cooperative and competitive elements in the system [we] . . .
have already . . . grouped utility indices . . . and these have no trans-
parent relation to the individual ones . . . and from this point-of-view
the doctrine of laissez faire lacks mathematical foundation” (324).
The argument winds up with the question, “Would it not be better
then to abandon the use of the utility function, and investigate situa-
tions more directly in terms of concrete concepts, like profit and money
value of production, in order to take advantage of the fact that money is
fundamental in most modern economies and to use the numbers which
it assigns to objects? Concrete concepts suggest concrete hypotheses”
(324).
Thus by 1932, after economists have had a chance to respond to the
arguments of his book, Evans is unrepentant. Economists, especially
mathematical economists of the neoclassical variety, have it wrong.
Utility theory, as well as subjective value theory, founders on the inte-
grability problem. One can only get out of the theory what one puts into
it. This, of course, was Volterra’s critique of Pareto more than a quar-
ter of a century earlier. For Evans, in mathematical economics one
should not be so concerned with the behavioral theories themselves.
Economic theory, or at least mathematics as applied to economic the-
ory, should trace the implications in logical systems of various
hypotheses that themselves are grounded in quantifiable objects or con-
cepts, and the implications are or should be developed to be themselves
either testable empirically though data analysis or testable through
common sense.
For Evans, as for Volterra, the issue was not formalist versus infor-
malist or antiformalist mathematics but rigorous versus nonrigorous
mathematics. Evans sought rigor in mathematical economics in the
way that Volterra had: The mathematical models are not free but rather
are tightly constrained by the natural phenomena they model.9 Evans’s

9. Let the record show, however, that Evans was in a position to affect the work of econ-
omists in the postwar period. In “American Mathematicians in World War I” and later work,
Price (1988, 267) links Rothrock’s (1919) information that “G. C. Evans of the Rice Institute
was a captain of ordinance on special mission in France” to the comment that “since G. C.
Evans was president of the [American Mathematical] Society in 1939 and 1940, he partici-

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 256 E. Roy Weintraub

mathematics looked back, though Volterra, to the optimism of the turn-

of-the-century solutions, which were to be abandoned by mathemati-
cians later; to the great challenges faced by mathematics in dealing
with set theory; and to that same mathematics in interpreting relativ-
ity and quantum phenomena. The move to axiomatics, well under way
within the mathematics community by the 1930s and instantiated in
economic argumentation by mathematical economists by the 1940s,10
left no place in economic theory for Evans. It did, however, leave an
alternative place for Evans.
As one of the founding members of the Econometrics Society in
1932, Evans subscribed to the call to “promote research in quantitative
and mathematical economics . . . [in order] to educate and benefit its
members and mankind, and to advance the scientific study and devel-
opment . . . of economic theory in its relation to mathematics and sta-
tistics” (Christ 1952, 5, 11). The point is that Evans’s views on mathe-
matical modeling are the views of an econometrician or applied
economist today or one who insists that the assumptions and con-
clusions of an economic model, a model constructed and developed
mathematically, must be measurable or quantifiable. This distinction
between “modelers” (or “applied economists”) and “theorists” divides
modern departments of economics even as both groups consider them-
selves to be neoclassical economists. That Evans’s first important stu-
dent was Roos, one of the early luminaries in econometrics and the
founder of his own Econometric Institute in New York (Fox 1987),
should allow us to reframe the idea of Evans’s “marginalization”: It was
not that Evans abandoned canonical mathematical economics but that
mathematical economics, increasingly connected to the new (very un-
Volterra-like) ideas of mathematical rigor in both mathematics and
applied mathematical science, moved away from Evans.11 In a real

pated in the appointment of the War Preparedness Committee of AMS and MAA. We also
have the knowledge that “the Aberdeen researchers included such key figures as [Oswald]
Veblen, Griffith C. Evans, Marston Morris, Warren Weaver, Norbert Weiner, Hans F. Blick-
felt, and G. A. Bliss, the first four of whom played significant roles in mobilizing the country’s
mathematical expertise during World War II” (Parshall 1994, 444). Thus, Evans was con-
nected to the emergent cyborg sciences, economics among them, which developed from the
collaborative work of economists and mathematicians during the war.
10. This is the subject of Weintraub and Mirowski 1994, a lengthy essay on Nicholas Bour-
baki and Gerard Debreu.
11. There is thus a delicious irony in the fact that Debreu has his office at Berkeley in
Evans Hall.

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 From Rigor to Axiomatics 257

sense, the distinction between rigor as materialist-reductionist quan-

tification and rigor as formal derivation, a distinction that was con-
tested at the end of the nineteenth century but disappeared as formal-
ism took hold in mathematics, reestablished itself in the distinction
between econometrics and mathematical economics, between applied
economics and economic theory. It is not unreasonable then to see
Lawrence R. Klein as linked to Griffith C. Evans.12 And I, as Klein’s
student, unravel the links.

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