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Lecture

Population Growth and Resource Consumption

Description

This lecture covers the mathematics of growth, exponential growth, resource consumption, logistic growth, and the Lotka-Volterra model. It discusses the limitations of exponential growth models, the concept of carrying capacity, and the Gompertz growth model. The instructor also presents case studies on population crashes and applies these models to real-world scenarios, such as predicting future population sizes and analyzing the growth of Covid-19 cases.

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Related concepts (32)

Population growth

Population growth is the increase in the number of people in a population or dispersed group. Actual global human population growth amounts to around 83 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.9 billion in 2020. The UN projected population to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

Population dynamics

Population dynamics is the type of mathematics used to model and study the size and age composition of populations as dynamical systems. Population dynamics has traditionally been the dominant branch of mathematical biology, which has a history of more than 220 years, although over the last century the scope of mathematical biology has greatly expanded. The beginning of population dynamics is widely regarded as the work of Malthus, formulated as the Malthusian growth model.

World population

In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded eight billion in mid-November 2022. It took over 200,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 219 years more to reach 8 billion. The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000.

Exponential growth

Exponential growth is a process that increases quantity over time. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change (that is, the derivative) of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential function of time, that is, the variable representing time is the exponent (in contrast to other types of growth, such as quadratic growth).

Logistic function

A logistic function or logistic curve is a common S-shaped curve (sigmoid curve) with the equation where For values of in the domain of real numbers from to , the S-curve shown on the right is obtained, with the graph of approaching as approaches and approaching zero as approaches . The logistic function finds applications in a range of fields, including biology (especially ecology), biomathematics, chemistry, demography, economics, geoscience, mathematical psychology, probability, sociology, political science, linguistics, statistics, and artificial neural networks.

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