In the spirit of the J. Willard Gibbs quote, known by generations of economists from the title page of Paul A. Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, i.e., “Mathematics is a Language”, the economics department at Columbia University changed its foreign language requirement in the Spring of 1950 to allow the substitution of mathematics “at a prescribed level” for one of two foreign languages it required of Ph.D. candidates. The Executive Officer of the Department at the time was James W. Angell.
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Faculty of Political Science
April 21, 1950
[…]
Professor [James W.]Angell presented a proposal of the Dept. of Economics to modify the language requirement for the Ph.D. degree so that Mathematics at a prescribed level may be substituted for one of the two required foreign languages. He moved the adoption of the following resolution:
The paragraph entitled “Languages” in the Announcement of the Faculty of Political Science be amended by adding the following sentence:
Prospective candidates in the Department of Economics may under certain circumstances and with the permission of the Executive Officer of that Department offer Mathematics and one foreign language instead of two foreign languages.
The motion was seconded and passed.
[…]
Source: Columbia University Archives, Minutes of the Faculty of Political Science, 1950-1962. pp. 1026-1027.
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ANGELL, James Waterhouse, Columbia Univ., New York 27, N.Y. (1924) Columbia Univ., prof. of econ., teach., res.; b. 1898; A.B., 1918, M.A., 1921, Ph.D., 1924, Harvard; 1919-20, Chicago. Fields 6 [Business Fluctuations], 10 [International Economics], 7 [Money and Banking; Short-term Credit; Consumer Finance]. Doc. dis. Theory of international prices (Harvard Univ. Press, 1926). Pub. Recovery of Germany (Yale Univ. Press, 1929; 2nd ed., 1932; German trans., 1930); Behavior of money (1936), Investment and business cycles (1941) (McGraw-Hill). Dir. W.W. in Amer.
Source: The 1948 Directory of the American Economic Association, American Economic Review, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jan., 1949), p. 6.
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New York Times’ obituary: “James Angell, 87; Leading Economist Taught At Columbia,” April 1, 1986.
Image Source: James Waterhouse Angell. Harvard Class of 1918, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report. Cambridge: 1943.