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I have been doing some work on R G D Allen in preparing his entry for the 
New Dictionary of National Biography and am interested in the impact of 
his 1938 book Mathematical Analysis for Economists.  Allen started 
teaching a course with this title at LSE in 1931 and this resulted in the 
book. I bought a 1954 edition and it was still the best book available 
when I was teaching courses in mathematics for economists in the early 
1960s. 
 
I am interested in how much influence it had and what were the 
alternatives. Don Patinkin (`The training of an economist', Banca 
Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review, xlviii(December 1995), p. 375) 
notes that, as a PhD student at the University of Chicago, he was the only 
student on a course taught by Jacob Marschak when he took "an advanced 
graduate course in mathematical economics devoted to solving the problems 
in the second half of RGD Allen's Mathematical Analysis for Economists 
(1938)."  One can see a link here, as Marschak is thanked by Roy Allen for 
reading the text of the 1938 book, but I am curious about whether there 
were other texts specifically written for economists at this time.  Can 
anyone tell me if there were such texts in the 1930s and 1940s? 
 
Jim Thomas 
 
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