• Journal for History of Mathematics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.47-59
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• 2011

Various mathematical models have been widely studied recently in both fields of mathematics and ecology since they help us understand the dynamical process of population changes in biological species living in a certain habitat and give useful predictions. The world population model proposed by Malthus, a British economist, in his work 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' published in the period of 1789~1826 is one of the early mathematical models on population changes. Malthus' models and the carrying capacity models of Verhulst in 1845 were based on exponential type functions. The independent research field of mathematical ecology has been started from Lotka's works in 1920's. Since then various different mathematical models has been proposed and examined. This article mainly deals with single species population change models expressed in terms of ordinary differential equations.