When a quantity grows towards a singularity under a finite variation (a "finite-time singularity") it is said to undergo hyperbolic growth. More precisely, the reciprocal function has a hyperbola as a graph, and has a singularity at 0, meaning that the limit as is infinite: any similar graph is said to exhibit hyperbolic growth. Description If the output of a function is inversely proportional to its input, or inversely proportional to the difference from a given value , the function will exhibit hyperbolic growth, with a singularity at . In the real world hyperbolic growth is created by certain non-linear positive feedback mechanisms. Comparisons with other growth Like exponential growth and logistic growth, hyperbolic growth is highly nonlinear, but differs in important respects. These functions can be confused, as exponential growth, hyperbolic growth, and the first half of logistic growth are convex functions; however their asymptotic behavior (behavior as input gets large) differs dramatically: logistic growth is constrained (has a finite limit, even as time goes to infinity), exponential growth grows to infinity as time goes to infinity (but is always finite for finite time), hyperbolic growth has a singularity in finite time (grows to infinity at a finite time). Applications Population Certain mathematical models suggest that until the early 1970s the world population underwent hyperbolic growth (see, e.g., Introduction to Social Macrodynamics by Andrey Korotayev et al.). It was also shown that until the 1970s the hyperbolic growth of the world population was accompanied by quadratic-hyperbolic growth of the world GDP, and developed a number of mathematical models describing both this phenomenon, and the World System withdrawal from the blow-up regime observed in the recent decades. The hyperbolic growth of the world population and quadratic-hyperbolic growth of the world GDP observed till the 1970s have been correlated by Andrey Korotayev and his colleagues to a non-linear second order positive feedback between the demographic growth and technological development, described by a chain of causation: technological growth leads to more carrying capacity of land for people, which leads to more people, which leads to more inventors, which in turn leads to yet more technological growth, and on and on. It has been also demonstrated that the hyperbolic models of this type may be used to describe in a rather accurate way the overall growth of the planetary complexity of the Earth since 4 billion BC up to the present. Other models