A comment on Thomas K. Burch's paper "Does demography need differential equations?

Abstract

The structure of this commentary is as follows. First I discuss differential equations and show that they are more common in demography than is generally accepted, and that they can be used to develop theories of population dynamics. The integration of mathematical modeling with differential equations, and statistical modeling with regression equations, is illustrated. In the following section I briefly discuss software. That discussion leads to a concrete proposal: to use a software package or computer language that facilitates both statistical and mathematical modeling. That language is R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that has utilities to solve differential equations. Section 4 is the conclusion.