General principles. Kinetics. Statics. Dynamics.

In the 50 years that have passed since Alfred Latka's death in 1949 his position as the father of mathematical demography has been secure. With his first demographic papers in 1907 and 1911 (the latter co authored with F. R. Sharpe) he laid the foundations for stable population theory, and over the next decades both largely completed it and found convenient mathematical approximations that gave it practical applica tions. Since his time, the field has moved in several directions he did not foresee, but in the main it is still his. Despite Latka's stature, however, the reader still needs to hunt through the old journals to locate his principal works. As yet no exten sive collections of his papers are in print, and for his part he never as sembled his contributions into a single volume in English. He did so in French, in the two part Theorie Analytique des Associations Biologiques (1934, 1939). Drawing on his Elements of Physical Biology (1925) and most of his mathematical papers, Latka offered French readers insights into his biological thought and a concise and mathematically accessible summary of what he called recent contributions in demographic analy sis. We would be accurate in also calling it Latka's contributions in demographic analysis.

General principles; Kinetics; Statics; Dynamics.

This is the part of any book where the authors usually discuss why they wrote it. We hope, however, that the text will justifY itself. In fact, any well-trained ecologist will immediately grasp the significance of these seminal works. We have therefore tried to keep our interpretive comments to a minimum. Students of "modern" theoretical ecology will want to contrast the papers in this collection with their modern derivatives. We believe that those who do so will be surprised, if not amazed, by the ecological sophistication and intellectual power of the earlier works. They will stand as a challenge to those who study them, and we hope, provide a standard for the quality of their work. By presenting this collection of works, most of them not easily available and/or for the first time in English, we hope to help them attain the high level of recognition they deserve. We are also enabling readers not sufficiently familiar with Italian to acquire enough of a background to properly follow the works in French not presented here by including Volterra's "Variazioni e fluttuazioni del numero d' indi vidui in specie animali convi venti" (1927), still available. in the original edition.

General principles. Kinetics. Statics. Dynamics.

Physical Biology of the Cell is a textbook for a first course in physical biology or biophysics for undergraduate or graduate students. It maps the huge and complex landscape of cell and molecular biology from the distinct perspective of physical biology. As a key organizing principle, the proximity of topics is based on the physical concepts that

This book illustrates how models of complex systems are built up and provides indispensable mathematical tools for studying their dynamics. This second edition includes more recent research results and many new and improved worked out examples and exercises.