The Biology of Numbers

The modern developments in mathematical biology took place roughly between 1920 and 1940, a period now referred to as the "Golden Age of Theoretical Biology". The eminent Italian mathematician Vito Volterra played a decisive and widely acknowledged role in these developments. Volterra's specific project was to transfer the model and the concepts of classical mechanics to biology, constructing a sort of "rational mechanics" and an "analytic mechanics" of biological associations. The new subject was thus to be equipped with a solid experimental or at least empirical basis, also in this case following the tried and tested example of mathematical physics. Although very few specific features of this reductionist programme have actually survived, Volterra's contribution was decisive, as is now universally acknowledged, in encouraging fresh studies in the field of mathematical biology. Even today, the primary reference in the literature of the field of population dynamics consists of Volterra's work and the descriptive schemata (the "models", in modern parlance) he proposed. The present book aims to fill this historiographic gap by providing an exhaustive collection of the correspondence