Fort's writing is engaging while still maintaining high standards of rigorous thinking. The examples all help pin the abstract mathematics to the natural world. If I have a quibble with the book, it is not with Fort's writing, but with the publisher's assembling of the manuscript. First, the pages are not numbered consecutively from 1 to 300. Rather, the pages of each chapter are numbered with chapter designation and page number within the chapter. In every theoretical-application pair of chapters, the theoretical chapter is numbered numerically followed by the related application chapter beginning with A. Thus, at the bottom of the pages we have for example page 3-4 as the fourth page of Chapter 3 (which is actually the seventh chapter of the book) and A3-4 as the fourth page of the application chapter (A3) following Chapter 3. If this sounds confusing, it is; this clumsy pagination makes it rather difficult to find your way through the book.

Secondly, the book lacks an index so we cannot find, for example, all the different ways that ideas such as eigenvalues are used throughout the book. But these are minor annoyances that can hopefully be corrected in a future edition or printing. It should not deter mathematicians and physicists who are interested in ecological systems and mathematical ecologists who would like to read a fresh approach to classical and current problems from studying this book and thinking deeply about the issues it raises. John Pastor, Journal of Ecological Modelling (Elsevier).