Pierre francois verhulst biography

Pierre François Verhulst (28 October 1804, in Brussels – 15 February 1849, in Brussels) was a.
On 28 September 1835 Verhulst was appointed professor of mathematics at the Université Libre of Brussels.
Pierre François Verhulst was a Belgian mathematician and a doctor in number theory from the University of Ghent in 1825.

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This entry contributed by Margherita Barile

Belgian mathematician who introduced the Verhulst equation (also known as the logistic equation) to model human population growth in 1838. He quit his literary studies to devote himself to mathematics. As an undergraduate at the University of Ghent, he was awarded two academic prizes for his works on the calculus of variations. Later, he published papers on number theory and physics.

The Belgian revolution of 1830 and the invasion of his country by the Dutch army in 1831 partially diverted his attention from abstract research. His political initiatives failed, nonetheless he could pursue his interests for social issues as a mathematician and a teacher. His interest in probability theory had been triggered by a new lottery game, but he soon applied it to political economy and later to demographical studies, a field that was rapidly developing due to Malthus' theory and the increasing use of statistics in human sciences. Verhulst, however, opposed any attempt to apply mathematical models to ethical judge

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Pierre François Verhulst

Belgian mathematician

Pierre François Verhulst (28 October 1804, in Brussels – 15 February 1849, in Brussels) was a Belgian mathematician and a doctor in number theory from the University of Ghent in 1825. He is best known for the logistic growth model.

Logistic equation

Main article: Logistic function

Verhulst developed the logistic function in a series of three papers between 1838 and 1847, based on research on modeling population growth that he conducted in the mid 1830s, under the guidance of Adolphe Quetelet; see Logistic function § History for details.

Verhulst published in Verhulst (1838) the equation:

where N(t) represents number of individuals at time t, r the intrinsic growth rate, and is the density-dependent crowding effect (also known as intraspecific competition). In this equation, the population equilibrium (sometimes referred to as the carrying capacity, K), , is

In Verhulst (1845) he named the solution the logistic curve.

Later, Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed popularized the equation, bu

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Biography

Pierre Verhulst was born into a wealthy family who spared no expense to give their son a top quality education. His secondary education was at the Athenaeum of Brussels which had an excellent reputation and gave a much broader education than other schools at that time, being particularly strong on its science teaching. Verhulst excelled in science but had other talents too, twice winning a Latin poetry prize. Two pupils in the same class as Verhulst were Joseph Plateau and Guillaume-Adolphe Nerenburger (1804-1869) and these three shared the top prize in mathematics in August 1822, the year they graduated from the Athenaeum. They had a wonderful mathematics teacher in their final years at the Athenaeum, namely Adolphe Quetelet, who had been appointed as a professor of mathematics there in 1819. Verhulst and Plateau spent many hours in deep scientific discussions, while both were strongly encouraged by Quetelet who became their friend and advisor. Plateau, of course, achieved fame and has a biography in this archive. Nerenburger also achieved fame with an outstanding ca