Pierre-François Verhulst et la loi logistique de la population

Abstract

Pierre-François Verhulst and the logistic law of population With the progress made by demographic analysis, the first attempts to formalize the dynamics of populations seem to have lost much of their theoretical and practical interests. But, if researches favouring the global approach – through which Quetelet and his disciple Verhulst became famous in the 1830s, then Pearl and Reed in the 1920s – have become obsolete, as far as prediction of human populations growth is concerned, they nevertheless represent a very significant landmark in the history of the “mathematisation”of the social sciences.