I conceived of the courses that led to this book on sabbatical in 1999–2000, during my time as the Mote Eminent Scholar at Florida State University and the Mote Marine Laboratory (a chair generously funded by William R. Mote, who was a good friend of science). While at FSU, I worked on a problem of life histories in fluctuating environments with Joe Travis and we needed to construct log-normal random variables of specified means and variances. I did the calculation during my time spent at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota and, while doing the calculation, realized that although this was something pretty easy and important in ecology and evolutionary biology, it was also something difficult to find in the standard textbooks on probability or statistics. It was then that I decided to offer a six-quarter graduate sequence in quantitative methods, starting the following fall. I advertised the course initially as “Quantitative tricks that I've learned which can help you” but mainly as “The Voyage of Quantitative Methods,” “The Voyage Continues,” etc. This book is the result of that course.

There is an approximate “Part I” and “Part II” structure. In the first three chapters, I develop some basic ideas about modeling (Chapter 1), differential equations (Chapter 2), and probability (Chapter 3). The remainder of the book involves the particular applications that interested me and the students at the time of the course: the evolutionary ecology of parasitoids (Chapter 4), the population biology of disease (Chapter 5), some problems of sustainable fisheries (Chapter 6), and the basics and application of stochastic population theory in ecology, evolutionary biology and biodemography (Chapters 7 and 8).