MathBench > Microbiology

Frank's Football Fiasco

Draw exponential growth

Hopefully at this point in your career as a biology student, you have seen a graph of exponential growth. Rather than show you a picture right away, use your mouse to draw an exponential curve (specifically, starting at 1 and doubling at each timestep) on the graph below.

Then click on the "graph" button to see how close you got.

 

way ahead of youSo, on regular graph paper, exponential growth looks like a curve heading up (or accelerating). When a few meningococci double, that only gives us a few more. But when thousands of meningococci double, we get thousands more. When a million double, we get a million more.

Pretty soon we've got a real infection going on.

(Note for people who are way ahead: In a few screens we'll find out that the graph-on-regular-paper doesn't work very well when talking about bacteria, and we'll fix that problem. But we're not there yet.)