Lagrangians for biological models

Abstract

We show that a method presented in [S.L. Trubatch and A. Franco, Canonical Procedures for Population Dynamics, J. Theor. Biol. 48 (1974), 299-324] and later in [G.H. Paine, The development of Lagrangians for biological models, Bull. Math. Biol. 44 (1982) 749-760] for finding Lagrangians of classic models in biology, is actually based on finding the Jacobi Last Multiplier of such models. Using known properties of Jacobi Last Multiplier we show how to obtain linear Lagrangians of those first-order systems and nonlinear Lagrangian of the corresponding single second-order equations that can be derived from them, even in the case where those authors failed such as the host-parasite model.