A Brief Introduction to the Infinitesimal Caculus

by Irving Fisher

Excerpt from A Brief Introduction to the Infinitesimal Calculus: Designed Especially to Aid in Reading Mathematical Economics and Statistics
This little volume contains the substance of lectures by which I have been accustomed to introduce the more advanced of my students to a course in modern economic theory. I could find no text-book sufficiently brief for my purpose, nor one which distributed the emphasis in the desired manner. My object, however, in preparing my notes for publication has not been principally to provide a book for classroom use. It must be admitted that very few teachers of Economics as yet desire to address their students in the mathematical tongue. I have had in mind not so much the classroom as the study. Teachers and students alike, however little they care about the mathematical medium for their own ideas, are growing to feel the need of it in order to understand the ideas of others. I have frequently received inquiries, as doubtless have other teachers, for some book which would enable a person without special mathematical training or aptitude to understand the works of Jevons, Walras, Marshall, or Pareto, or the mathematical articles constantly appearing in the Economic Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Giornale degli Economisti, and elsewhere. It is such a book that I have tried to write.

92 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Irving Fisher was an American economist, inventor, and social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the Post-Keynesian school.
Fisher made important contributions to utility theory and general equilibrium. He was also a pioneer in the rigurous study of intertemporal choice in markets, which led him to develop a theory of capital and interest rates.[4] His research on the quantity theory of money inaugurated the school of macroeconomic thought known as "monetarism." Both James Tobin and Milton Friedman called Fisher "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced."
Fisher was perhaps the first celebrity economist, but his reputation during his lifetime was irreparably harmed by his public statements, just prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, claiming that the stock market had reached "a permanently high plateau." His subsequent theory of debt deflation as an explanation of the Great Depression was largely ignored in favor of the work of John Maynard Keynes. His reputation has since recovered in neoclassical economics, particularly after his work was revived in the late 1950s and more widely due to an increased interest in debt deflation in the Late-2000s recession. Some concepts named after Fisher include the Fisher equation, the Fisher hypothesis, the international Fisher effect, and the Fisher separation theorem.