Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (September_19, 1901, Vienna, Austria - June_12, 1972, New York, USA) was a biologist who was a founder of general systems theory.
An Austrian citizen, he did much work in the United States. However, he experienced discrimination at the behest of American academe in that he declined to portray himself as a victimised refugee from Nazism and returned to work in Europe.
The individual growth model published by von Bertanlanffy in 1934 is widely used in biological models and exists in a number of permutations. A more general version was proposed by F. J. Richards in 1959. The growth model is a differential equation in the tradition of earlier demographic models, also used to model surplus production (biomasses rather than number of individuals or length of individuals).
In its simplest version the so called von Bertalanffy growth equation is expressed as a differential equation of length (L) over time (t):
when k is the individual growth rate and 
the maximum individual length.
References
- Bertalanffy, L. von, (1934).Untersuchungen über die Gesetzlichkeit des Wachstums. I. Allgemeine Grundlagen der Theorie; mathematische und physiologische Gesetzlichkeiten des Wachstums bei Wassertieren. Arch. Entwicklungsmech., 131:613-652.
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