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Early uses of Graunt's life table

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2012

H. L. Seal
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Extract

The first life table was a brilliant ‘guesstimate’ by John Graunt (1662) based on mortality data analysed by cause of death but not by age or sex. It was over thirty years before Halley (1693) constructed a table to show “the odds that there is, that a Person of that [any] Age does not die in a Year”. In the meantime several writers tried to use Graunt's figures to make deductions about probabilities of death. This note is a description of these efforts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Institute of Actuaries , Volume 107 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 507 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © Institute and Faculty of Actuaries 1980

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