This book is an outgrowth of one phase of an upper-division course on quantitative ecology, given each year for the past eight at Berkeley. I am most grateful to the students in that course and to many graduate students in the Berkeley Department of Zoology and Colleges of Engineering and Natural Resources whose spirited discussions inspired much of the book's content. I also am deeply grateful to those faculty colleagues with whom, at one time or another, I have shared courses or seminars in ecology or population biology, D.M. Auslander, L. Demetrius, G. Oster, O.H. Paris, F.A. Pitelka, A.M. Schultz, Y. Takahashi, D.B. Tyler, and P. Vogelhut, all of whom contributed substantially to the development of my thinking in those fields, to my Depart­ mental colleagues E. Polak and A.J. Thomasian, who guided me into the litera­ ture on numerical methods and stochastic processes, and to the graduate students who at one time or another have worked with me on population-biology projects, L.M. Brodnax, S-P. Chan, A. Elterman, G.C. Ferrell, D. Green, C. Hayashi, K-L. Lee, W.F. Martin Jr., D. May, J. Stamnes, G.E. Swanson, and I. Weeks, who, together, undoubtedly provided me with the greatest inspiration. I am indebted to the copy-editing and production staff of Springer-Verlag, especially to Ms. M. Muzeniek, for their diligence and skill, and to Mrs. Alice Peters, biomathematics editor, for her patience.