Did an 19th-Century Man Predict Your Death?

In the 1820s, an insurance actuary by the name of Benjamin Gompertz wrote an equation that reliably predicts when people are going to die. Learn how it works in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Laurence Fogelbaum here. Having a legacy is nice, but what
of the discovery that bears your name and perpetuity is
something that predicts the death of every human on the planet.
The thought didn't really seem to bother Benjamin Gomperts much.
Gumperts wasn't a fortune teller or the Grim Reaper or anything.

(00:23):
He was an actuary, someone who calculates the financial risk
and insurance company assumes by ensuring people. But the mortality
equation he formulated in is still our most useful tool
for describing how humans and many other animals die out
over time, and what the gum Parts law of mortality
tells us can be just as chilling today as it

(00:43):
was then. Gumparts was born in London in seventeen seventy
nine to a successful diamond dealer. Though the family was
wealthy enough, they were also Jewish, which excluded Benjamin from
studying at a university at that time. But boy did
that kid ever love math, and so he taught himself
dogged Lisa, mimitting papers to math publications throughout his early career.
While working a day job at the London Stock Exchange,

(01:05):
but what he really wanted was to be an actuary,
a vocation that would allow him to combine his obsessions
with math, statistics and financial theory. Unfortunately, nobody would hire
Gumparts because of his religion. In eighteen twenty four, he
quit the stock market following the death of his ten
year old son, and he was subsequently hired as an
actuary for his brother in law's new insurance company. The

(01:26):
next year, he submitted a paper to the Royal Society
entitled on the Nature of the function Expressive of the
Law of Human Mortality and on a New Mode of
Determining the Value of Life Contingencies. In it, he suggested
that for most of our adult lives are chances of
dying increase exponentially as we age. It wasn't good news,
but it got people's attention. Gumparts pretty much nailed the

(01:49):
way to calculate age specific death rates. Of course, he
did it to help his insurance company figure out the
appropriate rates for buying and selling annuities, but perhaps the
death of his only son drove him to a more
comprehensive understanding of the age related trends behind death. Either way,
Gumperts gave us an equation stating that after around age thirty,
the odds of a person buying the farm roughly doubles

(02:11):
every eight years, So assuming you were at least thirty
eight years ago, you were half as likely to croak
then as you are today. Nobody has been able to
prove this equation wrong for nearly two hundred years, although
another British actuary named William Makeum came along about a
half a century after Gumperts and added a good bit
to the original math that calculates one's risk of death

(02:33):
assuming equal risk for everybody of dying from certain specific dangers,
no matter what age we are. In case you were wondering,
Benjamin Gumperts died at the ripe old age of eighty six.
Oh and his equation works for pretty much all mammals
after they reach sexual maturity. The only one that straight
up defies it is the naked mole rat. Today's episode

(02:57):
was written by Jesselyne Shields and produced by Tyler Playing.
For more on this and lots of other topics, including
what the heck is up with naked mule raths, visit
our home planet how stuff Works dot Com