Alfred James Lotka
Alfred James Lotka (1880-1949) was an American mathematician.
Life
Alfred James Lotka was born to Polish-American parents in Lwów, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) on March 2, 1880. He gained his B.Sc. in 1901 at the University of Birmingham, England, did graduate work in 1901–02 at Leipzig University, received an M.A. in 1909 at Cornell University, and a D.Sc. at Birmingham University in 1912.
Lotka worked as a statistician for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in New York from 1924 until his retirement in 1948. He died December 5, 1949 in Red Bank, NJ.
Contributions
Lotka is best-known for the Lotka–Volterra equations predicting linked oscillations in populations of predator and prey and for his studies of human population stability. He contributed widely to physical biology, the energetics of evolution, demography and public health, and bibliometrics.
Lotka's Law
An application of Zipf's law describing the frequency of publication (productivity) of authors in any given field. Lotka's law models the productivity (i.e. frequency of publication) of scientists. The distribution is based on an inverse square law where the number of authors writing n papers is l/n2 of the number of authors writing one paper. Each subject area can have associated with it an exponent representing its specific rate of author productivity. Lotka's law is one of the traditional major components of bibliometrics along with obsolescence and Bradford's law of scattering.
Publication
- Lotka, Alfred J. (1926). "The frequency distribution of scientific productivity". Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. 16 (12): 317–324.
Further reading
Biography:
- "Alfred J. Lotka." Wikipedia [1]
- Haaga, J. Alfred Lotka, Mathematical Demographer. Population Reference Bureau, March 2000. [2]
Lotka's Law:
- "Lotka's law." Wikipedia [3]
Papers
Princeton University Library, Stokes Library - Wallace Hall. Collected papers of Lotka. 1881-1949. 15.8 linear ft.; 34 cartons.