Alfred J. Lotka was a Polish-American mathematician, physical chemist and statistician, born in 1880 and died in 1949, whose work centered on population dynamics and energetics. Lotka is best known for the predator–prey model proposed independently of Vito Volterra, and the Lotka–Volterra model remains the basis of many models used in ecology. Under the same name, the books Analytical Theory of Biological Populations and Elements of Mathematical Biology take up the mathematics of living populations.
