Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Hyperbolic growth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
When a quantity grows towards a singularity under a finite variation it is said to undergo hyperbolic growth. Hyperbolic growth is highly nonlinear and it is a stronger form of growth than exponential growth.
Certain mathematical models suggest that the world population undergoes hyperbolic growth. However, since the world population cannot truly become infinite within some finite amount of time such models should only be seen as approximations that may be valid for certain time periods.
Another example of hyperbolic growth can be found in queuing theory: the average waiting time of randomly arriving customers grows hyperbolically as a function of the average load ratio of the server. The singularity in this case is when the average amount of work arriving to the server equals the server's processing capacity. If the processing needs exceed the server's capacity, then there is no well-defined average waiting time, as the queue will build up towards infinity, in theory. (A practical implication of this particular example is that for highly loaded queuing systems the average waiting time can be extremely sensitive to the processing capacity.)