Alfred J. Lotka

Alfred James Lotka was a Polish-American mathematician, physical chemist and statistician, born in Lwów in Austria-Hungary in 1880 to American parents, famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics. A biophysicist, he is best known for proposing the predator-prey model, developed simultaneously but independently of Vito Volterra, and the Lotka-Volterra model is still the basis of many models used to analyse population dynamics in ecology. He took a B.Sc. at the University of Birmingham in 1901, an M.A. at Cornell in 1909 and a D.Sc. at Birmingham in 1912, worked as a chemist, patent examiner and physicist, and from 1924 until his retirement in 1948 was a statistician at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. In 1925 he published Elements of Physical Biology, one of the first books on mathematical biology.