Unpublished paper, 'On the law of human mortality' by Charles Jellicoe

Description

Jellicoe shares tables of mortality with headings age, number living, and decrement. However, he suggests that the variations and discrepancies in the annual decrements of life shown in the tables would disappear if a larger sample size were used. He believes that the decrements should follow a regular and uniform law and attempts to arrive at an approximation to such a law, by proper interpolations in the series of the numbers of persons living at every tenth year of human life. The method he proposes, for the attainment of this object, is to take the successive orders of differences, until the last order either disappears, or may be assumed equal to zero. With the aid of such differences, he constructs tables of the annual decrements founded principally on the results of the experience of the Equitable Assurance Society.

Annotations in pencil throughout.

Subject: Death / Mortality / Mathematics

Received 23 October 1838. Communicated by P M [Peter Mark] Roget.

Whilst the Royal Society declined to publish this paper in full, an abstract of the paper was published in volume 4 of Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [later Proceedings of the Royal Society] as 'On the laws of mortality'.

Reference number

AP/23/12

Earliest possible date

October 1838

Physical description

Ink and graphite pencil on paper

Page extent

30 pages

Format

Manuscript