William stanley jevons biography of abraham

British economist, statistician and professor of logic and philosophy. Date of Birth: Country: Great Britain

Biography of William Stanley Jevons

William Stanley Jevons was a British economist, statistician, and professor of logic and philosophy.

He was born on September 1, , in Liverpool, UK. His father, Thomas Jevons, was a prosperous iron merchant with a strong interest in science and writing on legal and economic topics. His mother was the daughter of renowned botanist and historian William Roscoe.

At the age of 15, Jevons was sent to the University College School in London to further his education.

William stanley jevons biography of abraham Jevons eds. His good fortune was further enhanced when he secured a newly-established professorship at Owens College. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The combination of leisure and solitude during his five years in Sydney provided, for one as powerfully inner-directed as Jevons, ideal conditions for the development of his great intellectual originality and capacity for independent thought.

It was during this time that he developed a strong belief in his ability to become a great thinker, which influenced his entire life. In , after spending two years at the University College School, Jevons unexpectedly received an offer to work as an assayer at a new mint in Australia. Despite his reluctance to leave the UK, financial considerations outweighed his reservations, as his family was in dire need of money due to his father's business failure in In June , Jevons left Britain and spent the next five years in Sydney.

By the end of his time in Australia, Jevons resigned from his position and returned to London in He enrolled at University College London (UCL) and eventually obtained a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of London.

While focusing on humanities during this period, Jevons never lost his interest in the natural sciences.

Biography of jacob Bam, Vincent, et al. Jevons also developed the hypothetico-deductive approach, expounded more recently by Karl Popper , in that he rejected the Baconian conception of scientific enquiry as starting from the accumulation of facts and stressed the role of conjectures and hypotheses. The first subject Jevons concentrated on was political economy, which he felt he could transform. Jevons had wide interests in political economy, from currency and finance to the relation of sunspots to business cycles.

Throughout his life, he continued to work on scientific topics, and his deep knowledge of the physical sciences greatly influenced the success of his major logical work, "The Principles of Science."

After receiving his master's degree, Jevons became a lecturer at Owens College in Manchester. In , he became a professor of logic, ethics, and philosophy, as well as a professor of political economy at Owens College.

The following year, he married Harriet Ann Taylor, whose father, John Edward Taylor, was the founder and owner of the "Manchester Guardian," a nationally recognized newspaper.

Although Jevons faced health issues, including insomnia, he found lecturing on a wide range of disciplines burdensome. In , he gladly accepted a position as a professor at University College London, leaving Owens College.

Biography of isaac He formulated the law of diminishing utility and then proceeded to deduce the utility-maximizing allocation formula for the consumer, establishing the pattern for much of the subsequent neoclassical theorizing. The Wealth of Nations is perhaps one of the driest on the subject. Then in he was appointed to a chair of political economy at Manchester and also to a professorship in logic and mental and moral philosophy. This typically and brilliantly incisive summary led Keynes to comment that Jevons chiseled in stone while Marshall knitted in wool.

Travel and music became his main sources of entertainment, but his health continued to deteriorate, and he suffered from depression. In , feeling overwhelmed by the routine work and lacking energy, Jevons retired from his professorship.

On August 13, , he drowned while swimming near Hastings. Jevons' contributions to the development of the so-called marginalist revolution in late 19th-century economics earned him a reputation as a leading political economist and logician of his time.

His works, along with those of Carl Menger in Vienna in and Léon Walras in Switzerland in , marked the beginning of a new era in the history of economic thought. Among his notable works are "The Theory of Political Economy," "The Coal Question," and "The State in Relation to Labour."