Alfred James Lotka (March 2, 1880 – December 5, 1949) was a Polish-American mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician, famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics.

His main interest was demography, which possibly influenced his professional choice as a statistician at Metropolitan Life Insurance.

The fourth part in the series, co-authored by F. R. Sharpe, modeled the time lag for pathogen incubation.

[5] While at Johns Hopkins, Lotka completed his book Elements of Physical Biology (1925), in which he extended the work of Pierre François Verhulst.

Although the book covered a large number of topics, from energetics of evolution (see below) to the physical nature of consciousness, the author is primarily known today for the Lotka–Volterra equation of population dynamics.

Lotka proposed the theory that the Darwinian concept of natural selection could be quantified as a physical law.

The law that he proposed was that the selective principle of evolution was one which favoured the maximum useful energy flow transformation.

The general systems ecologist Howard T. Odum later applied Lotka's proposal as a central guiding feature of his work in ecosystem ecology.