I'd been thinking of doing a course lecture on the similarities between the two for a while (but I don't usually have time to fit everything I want). I think your textbook had a big role in raising awareness of K.
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About precedence of discovery: Leslie independently published his work on matrix models right after Bernardelli, and Galton&Watson published their work on stochastic branching models decades after Bienayme. Von Foerster came decades after McKendrick. Lotka was 150 years after Euler.
When I was an undergrad, I took a class with Gerard Debreu. He said something in lecture one day that piqued my interest so I thought about it and went to his office hours to show him what I worked out. He listened, nodded, then went to a file cabinet and pulled out a paper he'd written long before.
He said, "if you're interested in this, look at this paper." What I'd done was like eq. 3 on page 1, and there were several pages after that. We talked for a while, I took the paper, thanked him, and got up to leave.
I couldn't help myself and at the door I paused and admitted, sheepishly, "I thought I'd discovered that." Debreu was a nice guy so he said, "But ... you did!"
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