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Early uses of Graunt's life table
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2012
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.
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- Copyright © Institute and Faculty of Actuaries 1980
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