Halley’s life table (1693)

Nicolas Bacaër ()
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Nicolas Bacaër: IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)

Chapter Chapter 2 in A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics, 2011, pp 5-10 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In 1693 the famous English astronomer Edmond Halley studied the birth and death records of the city of Breslau, which had been transmitted to the Royal Society by Caspar Neumann. He produced a life table showing the number of people surviving to any age from a cohort born the same year. He also used his table to compute the price of life annuities. This chapter recalls this work and puts it in the context of Halley’s life and of the early developments of “political arithmetic” and probability theory, which interested people such as Graunt, Petty, De Witt, Hudde, Huygens, Leibniz and de Moivre.

Keywords: Interest Rate; Royal Society; Life Table; Seventeenth Century; Main Research Subject (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1007/978-0-85729-115-8_2

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