This book is an introduction to mathematical biology for students with no experience in biology, but who have some mathematical background. The work is focused on population dynamics and ecology, following a tradition that goes back to Lotka and Volterra, and includes a part devoted to the spread of infectious diseases, a field where mathematical modeling is extremely popular. These themes are used as the area where to understand different types of mathematical modeling and the possible meaning of qualitative agreement of modeling with data. The book also includes a collections of problems designed to approach more advanced questions. This material has been used in the courses at the University of Trento, directed at students in their fourth year of studies in Mathematics. It can also be used as a reference as it provides up-to-date developments in several areas.

This is a collection of refereed papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Mathematical Population Dynamics. The selection of papers and their organization were made by the following persons: O Arino, D Axelrod, V Capasso, W Fitzgibbon, P Jagers, M Kimmel, D Kirschner, C Mode, B Novak, R Sachs, W Stephan, A Swierniak and H Thieme.It features some of the new trends in cell and human population dynamics. The main link between the two traits is that human populations of concern here are essentially those subject to cell diseases, either the processes of anarchic proliferation or those by which some cell lines are killed by an infectious agent.The volume is divided into 3 main parts. Each part is subdivided into chapters, each chapter concentrating on a specific aspect. Each aspect is illustrated by one or several examples, developed in sections contributed by several authors. A detailed introduction for each part will enable the reader to refer to chapters of interest. An index and a bibliography for each part is also included for easy reference.This book will be useful for those interested in the subject matter.

Why do organisms become extremely abundant one year and then seem to disappear a few years later? Why do population outbreaks in particular species happen more or less regularly in certain locations, but only irregularly (or never at all) in other locations? Complex population dynamics have fascinated biologists for decades. By bringing together mathematical models, statistical analyses, and field experiments, this book offers a comprehensive new synthesis of the theory of population oscillations. Peter Turchin first reviews the conceptual tools that ecologists use to investigate population oscillations, introducing population modeling and the statistical analysis of time series data. He then provides an in-depth discussion of several case studies--including the larch budmoth, southern pine beetle, red grouse, voles and lemmings, snowshoe hare, and ungulates--to develop a new analysis of the mechanisms that drive population oscillations in nature. Through such work, the author argues, ecologists can develop general laws of population dynamics that will help turn ecology into a truly quantitative and predictive science. Complex Population Dynamics integrates theoretical and empirical studies into a major new synthesis of current knowledge about population dynamics. It is also a pioneering work that sets the course for ecology's future as a predictive science.

As Eugene Wigner stressed, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in the physical sciences and their technological applications. The role of mathematics in the biological, medical and social sciences has been much more modest but has recently grown thanks to the simulation capacity offered by modern computers. This book traces the history of population dynamics---a theoretical subject closely connected to genetics, ecology, epidemiology and demography---where mathematics has brought significant insights. It presents an overview of the genesis of several important themes: exponential growth, from Euler and Malthus to the Chinese one-child policy; the development of stochastic models, from Mendel's laws and the question of extinction of family names to percolation theory for the spread of epidemics, and chaotic populations, where determinism and randomness intertwine. The reader of this book will see, from a different perspective, the problems that scientists face when governments ask for reliable predictions to help control epidemics (AIDS, SARS, swine flu), manage renewable resources (fishing quotas, spread of genetically modified organisms) or anticipate demographic evolutions such as aging.

This volume contains pedagogical and elementary introductions to genetics for mathematicians and physicists as well as to mathematical models and techniques of population dynamics. It also offers a physicist''s perspective on modeling biological processes. Each chapter starts with an overview followed by the recent results obtained by authors. Lectures are self-contained and are devoted to various phenomena such as the evolution of the genetic code and genomes, age-structured populations, demography, sympatric speciation, the Penna model, Lotka-Volterra and other predator-prey models, evolutionary models of ecosystems, extinctions of species, and the origin and development of language. Authors analyze their models from the computational and mathematical points of view.

Chaos in Ecology is a convincing demonstration of chaos in a biological population. The book synthesizes an ecologically focused interdisciplinary blend of non-linear dynamics theory, statistics, and experimentation yielding results of uncommon clarity and rigor. Topics include fundamental issues that are of general and widespread importance to population biology and ecology. Detailed descriptions are included of the mathematical, statistical, and experimental steps they used to explore nonlinear dynamics in ecology. Beginning with a brief overview of chaos theory and its implications for ecology. The book continues by deriving and rigorously testing a mathematical model that is closely wedded to biological mechanisms of their research organism. Therefrom were generated a variety of predictions that are fundamental to chaos theory and experiments were designed and analyzed to test those predictions. Discussion of patterns in chaos and how they can be investigated using real data follows and book ends with a discussion of the salient lessons learned from this research program Book jacket.

Metasolutions of Parabolic Equations in Population Dynamics explores the dynamics of a generalized prototype of semilinear parabolic logistic problem. Highlighting the author's advanced work in the field, it covers the latest developments in the theory of nonlinear parabolic problems. The book reveals how to mathematically determine if a species maintains, dwindles, or increases under certain circumstances. It explains how to predict the time evolution of species inhabiting regions governed by either logistic growth or exponential growth. The book studies the possibility that the species grows according to the Malthus law while it simultaneously inherits a limited growth in other regions. The first part of the book introduces large solutions and metasolutions in the context of population dynamics. In a self-contained way, the second part analyzes a series of very sharp optimal uniqueness results found by the author and his colleagues. The last part reinforces the evidence that metasolutions are also categorical imperatives to describe the dynamics of huge classes of spatially heterogeneous semilinear parabolic problems. Each chapter presents the mathematical formulation of the problem, the most important mathematical results available, and proofs of theorems where relevant.