ABSTRACT
The effort to make economics mathematical is set in different historical moments, each according to a transformed place for mathematics in economics. Among them one may cite the first introduction of calculus in the 1860s, the increased use of statistics in the late nineteenth century, or the development of econometrics in the 1920s and 1930s. Among economists such as Stanley Jevons and Francis Edgeworth, Leon Walras perhaps the most ardent, as he saw his relentless and seemingly unyielding advocacy of a suitably mathematical economics met with disdain in France, resulting in his being regarded as an outsider by its established academic world of political economy. His main economic work, Elements of Pure Political Economy, through its revisions the cynosure of his writing over a lifetime, was intended to demonstrates the possibilities of an algebraic construction of and solution to the interplay of resources, output, and demand in any national economy.
