Griffith Conrad Evans (11 May 1887 – 8 December 1973) was a mathematician working for much of his career at the University of California, Berkeley. He is largely credited with elevating Berkeley's mathematics department to a top-tier research department, having recruited many notable mathematicians in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Biography
Evans earned his PhD at Harvard in 1910 under Maxime Bôcher with a dissertation on Volterra's Integral Equation, after which he did a post-doc for two years at the University of Rome on a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard. The experience of working under Vito Volterra shaped his intellectual life and solidified his interest in the application of mathematics to a broad range of fields. Evans became close to Volterra during his time at Rome, being invited on many occasions to lunch with the Volterra family; he would remain in contact with Virginia Volterra, Vito Volterra's niece, until the 1960s.
Evans was appointed assistant professor at Rice University in 1912, with a recommendation letter from Volterra, and promoted to professor in 1916. He married Isabel Mary John in 1917 and they would eventually have 3 children. During his time at Rice, he managed to attract significant mathematicians as visiting professors, such as Szolem Mandelbrojt, Tibor Rado, and Karl Menger. His early research dealt with functional analysis, potential theory, integral equations, and mathematical economics.
In 1934, he moved to University of California, Berkeley to chair the mathematics department. Here, Evans was tasked with improving the department, including the initiation of a graduate program. Much of his success was due to his ability to recruit many notable research mathematicians, including Hans Lewy, Jerzy Neyman, and Alfred Tarski. His own research work was in potential theory and mathematics applied to economics. He chaired Berkeley's department until 1949 and retired in 1955, eventually becoming the namesake of Evans Hall at Berkeley.
Mathematical economics
Evans first work in mathematical economics, entitled A Simple Theory of Competition a restatement of Augustine Cournot's monopoly/duopoly model. Evans expanded Cournot's work significantly by exploring the analytical implications of a variety of different assumptions as to the behavior and objectives of either the monopolist or the duopolists. His following work, The Dynamics of Monopoly, published in 1924, was one of the first to apply the calculus of variations to economic theory. He frames the same monopolist problem now in an intertemporal framework, that is, instead of seeking immediate profit-maximization, the monopolist aims to make his profits as maximum through an interval of time. His work was followed by his Ph.D. advisee Charles Roos who generalized his monopoly model to a case with multiple competing firms. Roos also managed to express this model within a general equilibrium framework. Roos would also be one of the three founders of the Econometric Society alongside Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch and American economist Irving Fisher. Evans participated in the foundation of the Society and became one of its first fellows.
The first economist to take notice of Evans' work was Harold Hotelling. He met personally with Evans at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society and was immediately impressed by the scope of his work which he deemed to be a "dawning economic theory" that would bear "to the older theories the relations which the Hamiltonian dynamics and the thermodynamics of entropy bear to their predecessors". At this time, economics was not seen as a mathematical science, and many economists were even doubtful if mathematics could be useful for social sciences in general. As a result, Evans and Roos found only a small audience properly equipped to understand their works. Even so, the more mathematically inclined economists and mathematicians E. B. Wilson, Irving Fisher, Henry Schultz, and Paul Samuelson all recognized the importance of their theory.
Evans main contribution to mathematical economics came in the form of his 1930 textbook Mathematical Introduction to Economics, published by Mc Graw Hill. The book's reception, however, failed to meet Evans' expectations. British economist Arthur L. Bowley, in particular, was very critical stating that the book would be of no use either to the mathematician nor to the economist. R. G. D. Allen, a colleague of Bowley, also criticized the book for not presenting a general economic theory and focusing too much on the resolution of particular problems. Some positive reviews came from Roos and Hotelling, the latter going as far as saying that the book helped "lay a groundwork upon which future contributions to political economy of first-rate importance may be expected to be based".
Notable positions
Chair, University of California, Berkeley Mathematics Department (1934–1949)
President, American Mathematical Society (1939–1940)
Member, National Academy of Sciences (1933)
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1934)
Member, American Philosophical Society (1941)
Selected publications
Evans, G. C. (1924). "The Dynamics of Monopoly". The American Mathematical Monthly. 31 (2): 77–83. doi:10.2307/2300113. JSTOR 2300113.
The logarithmic potential, discontinuous Dirichlet and Neumann problems. American Mathematical Society. 1927.
Mathematical introduction to economics. McGraw Hill. 1930.
Evans, Griffith C. (1932). "The Role of Hypothesis in Economic Theory". Science. 75 (1943): 321–324. Bibcode:1932Sci....75..321E. doi:10.1126/science.75.1943.321. JSTOR 1657995. PMID 17797670.
Stabilité et dynamique de la production dans l'économie politique. Gauthier-Villars. 1932.
Evans, Griffith C. (1934). "Maximum Production Studied in a Simplified Economic System". Econometrica. 2 (1): 37–50. doi:10.2307/1907949. JSTOR 1907949.
Evans, Griffith C. (1935). "On potentials of positive mass. I". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 37 (2): 226–253. doi:10.1090/s0002-9947-1935-1501785-8. MR 1501785.
Evans, Griffith C. (1935). "On potentials of positive mass. II". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 38 (2): 201–236. doi:10.1090/s0002-9947-1935-1501809-8. MR 1501809.
Evans, Griffith C. (1936). "Potentials and positively infinite singularities of harmonic functions". Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik. 43 (1): 419–424. doi:10.1007/BF01707623. S2CID 121749166.
Evans, G. C. (1937). "Modern methods of analysis in potential theory" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 48 (3): 481–502. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1937-06579-7. MR 1563577.
Evans, G. C. (1941). "Continua of minimum capacity" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 47 (10): 717–733. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1941-07541-5. MR 0005261.
Biographical references
Morrey, C. B. Jr.; Lewy, H.; Shephard, R. W.; Vaught, R. L. (May 1977), "Griffith Conrad Evans, Mathematics: Berkeley 1887-1973, Professor", 1977, University of California: In Memoriam, Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, pp. 102–103
Morrey, Charles B. Jr. (1983), "Griffith Conrad Evans", in National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (ed.), Biographical Memoirs, vol. 54, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, pp. 126–155, ISBN 978-0-309-03391-6.
Rider, Robin E. (1985), "An opportune time: Griffith C. Evans and mathematics at Berkeley" (PDF), in Duren, Peter (ed.), A Century of Mathematics in America, Part II, History of Mathematics, vol. 2, Providence: American Mathematical Society, pp. 283–302, ISBN 978-0-8218-0130-7, MR 1003134, Zbl 0671.01027.
Simon, H. A. (2008), "Evans, Griffith Conrad (1887–1973)", The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, vol. In: Palgrave Macmillan (eds) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics., Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–3, doi:10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_552-2, ISBN 978-1-349-95121-5