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Biological exponential growth is the unrestricted growth of a population of organisms, occurring when resources in its habitat are unlimited. [1] Most commonly apparent in species that reproduce quickly and asexually , like bacteria , exponential growth is intuitive from the fact that each organism can divide and produce two copies of itself.
In the long run, exponential growth of any kind will overtake linear growth of any kind (that is the basis of the Malthusian catastrophe) as well as any polynomial growth, that is, for all α: = There is a whole hierarchy of conceivable growth rates that are slower than exponential and faster than linear (in the long run).
By now, it is a widely accepted view to analogize Malthusian growth in Ecology to Newton's First Law of uniform motion in physics. [8] Malthus wrote that all life forms, including humans, have a propensity to exponential population growth when resources are abundant but that actual growth is limited by available resources:
A quantity undergoing exponential decay. Larger decay constants make the quantity vanish much more rapidly. This plot shows decay for decay constant (λ) of 25, 5, 1, 1/5, and 1/25 for x from 0 to 5. A quantity is subject to exponential decay if it decreases at a rate proportional to its current value.
Exponential growth or exponential decay—where the varaible change is proportional to the variable value—are thus modeled with exponential functions. Examples are unlimited population growth leading to Malthusian catastrophe , continuously compounded interest , and radioactive decay .
Allometry (Ancient Greek ἄλλος állos "other", μέτρον métron "measurement") is the study of the relationship of body size to shape, [1] anatomy, physiology and behaviour, [2] first outlined by Otto Snell in 1892, [3] by D'Arcy Thompson in 1917 in On Growth and Form [4] and by Julian Huxley in 1932.
RGR is a concept relevant in cases where the increase in a state variable over time is proportional to the value of that state variable at the beginning of a time period. In terms of differential equations, if is the current size, and its growth rate, then relative growth rate is
The Gompertz curve or Gompertz function is a type of mathematical model for a time series, named after Benjamin Gompertz (1779–1865). It is a sigmoid function which describes growth as being slowest at the start and end of a given time period.