It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science ... simply because it deals with quantities... As the complete theory of almost every other science involves the use of calculus, so we cannot have a true theory of Economics without its aid.
Interpretation
Economics should utilize mathematical principles to become a true science.
In this quote, William Stanley Jevons asserts that for economics to be considered a legitimate science, it must incorporate mathematical methods, particularly calculus. He emphasizes that just as other scientific fields rely on mathematical theories to analyze and understand complexities, economics too requires these tools to properly address its fundamental quantities and relationships.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of math in social sciences, you might quote Jevons to emphasize your point.
Whoever wishes to acquire a deep acquaintance with Nature must observe that there are analogies which connect whole branches of science in a parallel manner, and enable us to infer of one class of phenomena what we know of another. It has thus happened on several occasions that the discovery of an unsuspected analogy between two branches of knowledge has been the starting point for a rapid course of discovery.
Value is the most invincible and impalpable of ghosts, and comes and goes unthought of, while the visible and dense matter remains as it was.
Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.
There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.
There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.
Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.
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