F. B. (Frank Byron) Jevons

Frank Byron Jevons was a British scholar and university administrator born in 1858 and educated at Nottingham High School and Wadham College, Oxford. He spent much of his career at Durham, where he taught classics and philosophy and later took on senior roles including Master of Hatfield College and Vice-Chancellor.

His writing ranged across classics, comparative religion, mythology, philosophy, and social questions, which is why he is often described as a polymath. Among his better-known works are An Introduction to the History of Religion and Comparative Religion, books that helped bring the study of religion to a wider English-speaking readership.

Jevons died in 1936. Today he is remembered less as a single-discipline specialist than as a learned and energetic interpreter of big ideas, with a gift for connecting ancient history, belief, and human culture for general readers.