In this book, John P. Burkett presents microeconomics as an evolving science, interacting with mathematics, psychology, and other disciplines and offering solutions to a growing range of practical problems. The book shows how early contributors such as Xenophon, Ibn Khaldun, and David Hume posed the normative and positive questions central to microeconomics. It expounds constrained optimization techniques, as developed by economists and mathematicians from Daniel Bernoulli to Leonid Kantorovich, emphasizing their value in deriving norms of rational behavior and testable hypotheses about...