Determining the birth function for an age structured population.

This paper deals with an inverse problem in age-structured population dynamics, namely the recovery of the unknown birth function from the additional or overposed data consisting of the total population over a time interval equal to the maximum life span of the species. Conditions on the data are given to guarantee the existence and uniqueness of a solution, and the question of continuous dependence of the birth function on the data is addressed. Some numerical simulations are presented to indicate that one can, in fact, use the methods of the paper to reconstruct the birth function.