Branching processes as population dynamics (Q1903610)

This is the Kolmogorov Lecture given at the 3rd Bernoulli World Congress and 57th Annual Meeting of the IMS at Chapel Hill in 1994. Its main purpose is to suggest a way in which the independence assumptions in the theory of general branching processes, where the author has been the driving force for many years, may be weakened to allow a certain type of dependence without affecting the broad conclusions which may be drawn from mathematical analysis of the process. Particular attention is drawn to the need to reconcile the development of sophisticated mathematical theory with the realistic modelling of population dynamics. In this spirit, the paper starts with a brief but impressive historical survey.