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Often the independent variable is time. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential function of time, that is, the variable representing time is the exponent (in contrast to other types of growth, such as quadratic growth). Exponential growth is the inverse of logarithmic growth.
Biological exponential growth is the unrestricted growth of a population of organisms, occurring when resources in its habitat are unlimited. [1] Most commonly apparent in species that reproduce quickly and asexually , like bacteria , exponential growth is intuitive from the fact that each organism can divide and produce two copies of itself.
Thomas Robert Malthus, after whom Malthusianism is named. Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline.
By now, it is a widely accepted view to analogize Malthusian growth in Ecology to Newton's First Law of uniform motion in physics. [8] Malthus wrote that all life forms, including humans, have a propensity to exponential population growth when resources are abundant but that actual growth is limited by available resources:
Population growth is the increase in the number of people in a population or dispersed group. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 8.1 billion in 2024. [ 2 ] Actual global human population growth amounts to around 70 million annually, or 0.85% per year.
The growth equation for exponential populations is = where e is Euler's number, a universal constant often applicable in logistic equations, and r is the intrinsic growth rate.
Of the relationship between population and economics, Malthus wrote that when the population of laborers grows faster than the production of food, real wages fall because the growing population causes the cost of living (i.e., the cost of food) to go up. Difficulties of raising a family eventually reduce the rate of population growth, until the ...
The Limits to Growth (LTG) is a 1972 report [2] that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. [3] The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems.