Deciphering death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825) ‘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’

By Thomas B. L. Kirkwood. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2015

1,401 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In 1825, the actuary Benjamin Gompertz read a paper, ‘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’, to the Royal Society in which he showed that over much of the adult human lifespan, age-specific mortality rates increased in an exponential manner. Gompertz's work played an important role in shaping the emerging statistical science that underpins the pricing of life insurance and annuities. Latterly, as the subject of ageing itself became the focus of scientific study, the Gompertz model provided a powerful stimulus to examine the patterns of death across the life course not only in humans but also in a wide range of other organisms. The idea that the Gompertz model might constitute a fundamental ‘law of mortality’ has given way to the recognition that other patterns exist, not only across the species range but also in advanced old age. Nevertheless, Gompertz's way of representing the function expressive of the pattern of much of adult mortality retains considerable relevance for studying the factors that influence the intrinsic biology of ageing. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Subfields: Aging, Demography, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7e5b6993fcdbb1bd347c6a8b792bb8939732296

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aging

In Demography

In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Dissecting the Phenotypic Components of Crop Plant Growth and Drought Responses Based on High-Throughput Image Analysis[W][OPEN] (2014, background): “The complexity of plant growth has been long recognized (Gompertz, 1825; Blackman, 1919; Erickson, 1976; Hunt, 1982; Karkach, 2006).”
Euler's constant: Euler's work and modern developments (2013, background): “d the Gompertz constant by Le Lionnais [203]. 23 Benjamin Gompertz (1779–1865) was a mathematician and actuary who in 1825 proposed a functional model for approximating mortality tables, cf. Gompertz [132],[133]. The Gompertz function and Gompertz distribution are named in his honor. I have not loca”
Nonlinear Regression Models and Applications in Agricultural Research (2015, positive): “3] Gompertz (1825) Y = Yasymexp{–exp[–k(t – tm)]}”
Soil Compressibility Models for a Wide Stress Range (2016, background): “Sigmoidal and Gompertz functions are special examples (Gompertz 1825; Gregory et al. 2006).”
Classical Mathematical Models for Description and Prediction of Experimental Tumor Growth (2014, background): “first introduced in [50] for a different purpose – the description of”
The use of Gompertz models in growth analyses, and new Gompertz-model approach: An addition to the Unified-Richards family (2017, positive): “Abstract The Gompertz model is well known and widely used in many aspects of biology. It has been frequently used to describe the growth of animals and plants, as well as the number or volume of bacteria and cancer cells. Numerous parametrisations and re-parametrisations of varying usefulness are fo”
Harbour porpoises ( Phocoena phocoena ) in the North Atlantic: Biological parameters (2013, methodology): “Methods of fitting growth curves to such data are reviewed by Kaufmann (1981), and the most frequently used models include von Bertalanffy (1960) and Gompertz (1825) – see also Zullinger et al. (1984). Both models express growth exponentially and provide an asymptotic size.”