The interest in the historical and mathematical direction in Russia has two specific features. Firstly, the history of this direction allows us to understand how science developed, what achievements were obtained. Secondly, the study of history allows us to evaluate new works in terms of what has already been done, but well forgotten. The works of individual pre-revolutionary scholars found themselves in the shadows or were well forgotten for a variety of reasons. Most often — ideology. The article analyzes the work of the forgotten Russian scientist mathematician Nikolai Alexandrovich Stolyarov (1870–1942) in 1902, devoted to an attempt to mathematically prove the famous formula of M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky (1865–1919): “the marginal utility of freely produced products is proportional to their labor costs”, formulated in 1901. The paper shows how the formalization and analysis of this verbal formula led to new results: implicitly introducing the “national economic” function usefulness and demonstration of the possibility of applying the optimization procedure for such a function, which was noted later in the works of N. S. Shukhov.