Driving along the motorway on a busy day, you see brake-lights ahead and slow down until the flow grinds to a halt. The traffic stutters forward for five minutes or so until, mysteriously, the way ahead is clear again. But, before long, you arrive at the back of another stagnant queue. Hold-ups like this, with no apparent cause, are known as phantom traffic jams and you may experience several such delays on a journey of a few hours [TM216 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Traffic jams can have many causes [Image © Susanneiles.com. JPEG]
is the e-folding time. For every period of length 
. Exponential growth was assumed by Thomas Malthus (1798), and he predicted that the population would exhaust the food supply within a half-century. ![African Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus). [Image from Wikimedia Commons]](https://thatsmaths.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/leopard-mid-res.jpg)
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