Alfred
Marshall
1842 — 1924
The Cambridge mathematician who gave economics the supply-and-demand cross, told his students to burn the mathematics, and spent twenty years on a book whose second volume never came.
A Bank of England cashier's son who refused the Church for mathematics, he came out Second Wrangler in 1865, walked the slums of English cities looking at faces, and decided political economy might do something about them. He lost his fellowship by marrying his student Mary Paley, came back to Cambridge as professor in 1885, and in 1890 published the Principles of Economics, with the diagrams in footnotes and the mathematics in an appendix. He gave the subject elasticity, consumer's surplus, the short and the long period, and the Economics Tripos, and he trained Pigou and Keynes.
In 1896 he spoke against degrees for the women he had taught. His wife had taught them for twenty years. He will not plead the spirit of the age.