C. Jeffries – författare

Mathematical ecology is the application of mathematics to describe and understand ecosystems. There are two main approaches. One is to describe natural communities and induce statistical patterns or relationships which should generally occur. However, this book is devoted entirely to introducing the student to the second approach: to study deterministic mathematical models and, on the basis of mathematical results on the models, to look for the same patterns or relationships in nature. This book is a compromise between three competing desiderata. It seeks to: maximize the generality of the models; constrain the models to "behave" realistically, that is, to exhibit stability and other features; and minimize the difficulty of presentations of the models. The ultimate goal of the book is to introduce the reader to the general mathematical tools used in building realistic ecosystem models. Just such a model is presented in Chapter Nine. The book should also serve as a stepping-stone both to advanced mathematical works like Stability of Biological Communities by Yu. M. Svirezhev and D. O. Logofet (Mir, Moscow, 1983) and to advanced modeling texts like Freshwater Ecosystems by M. Straskraba and A. H. Gnauch (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1985).

In mathematics there are limits, speed limits of a sort, on how many computational steps are required to solve certain problems. The theory of computational complexity deals with such limits, in particular whether solving an n-dimensional version of a particular problem can be accomplished with, say, 2 n n steps or will inevitably require 2 steps. Such a bound, together with a physical limit on computational speed in a machine, could be used to establish a speed limit for a particular problem. But there is nothing in the theory of computational complexity which precludes the possibility of constructing analog devices that solve such problems faster. It is a general goal of neural network researchers to circumvent the inherent limits of serial computation. As an example of an n-dimensional problem, one might wish to order n distinct numbers between 0 and 1. One could simply write all n! ways to list the numbers and test each list for the increasing property. There are much more efficient ways to solve this problem; in fact, the number of steps required by the best sorting algorithm applied to this problem is proportional to n In n .

Mathematical ecology is the application of mathematics to describe and understand ecosystems. There are two main approaches. One is to describe natural communities and induce statistical patterns or relationships which should generally occur. However, this book is devoted entirely to introducing the student to the second approach: to study deterministic mathematical models and, on the basis of mathematical results on the models, to look for the same patterns or relationships in nature. This book is a compromise between three competing desiderata. It seeks to: maximize the generality of the models; constrain the models to "behave" realistically, that is, to exhibit stability and other features; and minimize the difficulty of presentations of the models. The ultimate goal of the book is to introduce the reader to the general mathematical tools used in building realistic ecosystem models. Just such a model is presented in Chapter Nine. The book should also serve as a stepping-stone both to advanced mathematical works like Stability of Biological Communities by Yu. M. Svirezhev and D. O. Logofet (Mir, Moscow, 1983) and to advanced modeling texts like Freshwater Ecosystems by M. Straskraba and A. H. Gnauch (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1985).