Organizers: John Bongaarts, Hal Caswell, Noreen Goldman, Josh Goldstein, Ron Lee, and Shripad Tuljapurkar

Cosponsored by MBI and the OSU Institute for Population Research (IPR).

Nathan Keyfitz (1913--2010) made fundamental and highly influential contributions to demography over a long and productive career. His work was characterized by an elegance of approach and a depth of insight that came from a deep recognition of the interplay among models, data, and interpretation. This symposium, marking the 100th anniversary of his birth, will bring together a diverse set of scientists studying, to use Keyfitz's term, the mathematics of population.

The main goal of the Symposium is to serve as a forum for presentation of ongoing research on the mathematics of population. The program will encompass research on human and non-human populations, and both theoretical and applied research. In bringing together both mathematical demographers and population biologists, the symposium will adhere to Keyfitz's view, from his first book to his last, that population itself as an object worthy of study, not limited to particular species:

"[This book] tries to gather together, and as far as possible to systematize, the most relevant parts of that large body of mathematical theory concerned with the growth processes of human and animal populations."

Introduction to the Mathematics of Population (1968)

"... the general drift of their replies was that ... there was nothing that could be usefully added. We were monumentally wrong. We hadn't noticed the world of whales and birds and land animals, i.e., the world of biology."

Applied Mathematical Demography, 3rd Edition (2005)

The symposium program will be a mix of theoretical and applied work -- mathematical exercises as well as empirical work that make use of models and techniques that draw on mathematical demography.

The symposium program will be structured so as to encourage maximum exchange among scholars in attendance. Sharing of work in progress will be encouraged (and therefore there will be no requirement to prepare manuscripts of presentations). The goal is to stimulate discussion, cooperation, and collaboration.

Confirmed Speakers

• Juha Alho, University of Eastern Finland
• Annette Baudisch, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
• John Bongaarts, Population Council
• Vladimir Canudas Romo, University of Copenhagen
• James Carey, University of California, Davis
• John Casterline, The Ohio State University
• Marcia Castro, Harvard University
• Hal Caswell, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
• Joel Cohen, Rockefeller University
• Jean-Michel Gaillard, CNRS
• Noreen Goldman, Princeton University
• Carol Horvitz, University of Miami
• James Holland Jones, Stanford University
• Herve Le Bras, National Institute of Demographic Studies
• Jean-Dominique Lebreton, CNRS
• Ron Lee, University of California, Berkeley
• Nan Li, United Nations Population Division
• Jessica Metcalf, Oxford University
• Steve Orzack, Fresh Pond Research Institute
• Sam Preston, University of Pennsylvania
• Robert Schoen, Penn State
• David Steinsaltz, University of Oxford
• Shripad Tuljapurkar, Stanford University
• Ken Wachter, University of California, Berkeley
• John Wilmoth, University of California, Berkeley
• Anatoli Yashin, Duke University
• Emilio Zhageni, Queens College - CUNY