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Feller's Contributions to Mathematical Biology

History and Overview 2015-01-22 v1 Probability Populations and Evolution

Abstract

This is a review of William Feller's important contributions to mathematical biology. The seminal paper [Feller1951] "Diffusion processes in genetics" was particularly influential on the development of stochastic processes at the interface to evolutionary biology, and interesting ideas in this direction (including a first characterization of what is nowadays known as "Feller's branching diffusion") already shaped up in the paper [Feller 1939] (written in German) "The foundations of a probabistic treatment of Volterra's theory of the struggle for life". Feller's article "On fitness and the cost of natural selection" [Feller 1967] contains a critical analysis of the concept of "genetic load".

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Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.05278,
  title  = {Feller's Contributions to Mathematical Biology},
  author = {Ellen Baake and Anton Wakolbinger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.05278},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

The present article will appear in: Schilling, R.L., Vondracek, Z., Woyczynski, W.A.: The Selected Papers of William Feller. Springer Verlag