Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
GOMPERTZ, BENJAMIN (b. London, England, 5
March 1779; d. London, 14 July 1865), mathematics.
One of three prominent sons of a distinguished
mercantile family that emigrated from Holland in the
eighteenth century, Gompertz appeared destined for
a financial career. Denied matriculation at the
universities because he was Jewish, he joined the
Society of Mathematicians of Spitalfields in 1797 and
educated himself by reading the masters, especially
Newton, Colin Maclaurin, and William Emerson. He
found in various learned societies the intellectual
stimulation that led to many publications and a wide
spectrum of accomplishments. Papers to the Royal
Astronomical Society on the differential sextant and
the aberration of light belie Gompertz's own statement
that he was not a practicing astronomer. The
Royal Society, of which he was elected a fellow in
1819; the London Mathematical Society, of which he
was a charter member; the Society of Actuaries; and
the Royal Statistical Society were only a few of the
learned and philanthropic organizations to which he
gave of his talent and energy.
In 1810 Gompertz married Sir Moses Montefiore's
daughter Abigail and joined the stock exchange. In
1820, in a paper to the Royal Society, he applied the
method of fluxions to the investigation of various life
contingencies. In 1824 he was appointed actuary and
head clerk of the newly founded Alliance Assurance
Company. A year later he published what is now
called Gompertz's law of mortality, which states
“ ... the average exhaustion of man's power to avoid
death to be such that at the end of equal infinitely
small intervals of time he lost equal portions of his
remaining power to oppose destruction which he had
at the commencement of these intervals.” His rigid
adherence to Newton's fluxional notation prevented
wide recognition of this accomplishment, but he must
be rated as a pioneer in actuarial science and one
of the great amateur scholars of his day. Augustus
De Morgan called Gompertz “the link between the
old and new” when he mourned “the passing of
the last of the learned Newtonians.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
Gompertz's work on life contingencies
appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society: “A Sketch of the Analysis and Notation
Applicable to the Value of Life Contingencies,” 110 (1820),
214-294; “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,” 115 (1825),
513-585; and “A Supplement to the Two Papers of 1820
and 1825,” 152 (1862), 511-559.
“The Application of a Method of Differences to the
Species of Series Whose Sums Are Obtained by Mr.
Landen by the Help of Impossible Quantities,” ibid.,96
(1806), 174-194, led to The Principles and Applications of
Imaginary Quantities, 2 vols. (London, 1817-1818). The
sequel to these two tracts is Hints on Porisms ... (London,
1850).
A regular contributor to the Gentleman's Mathematical
Companion from 1796, Gompertz was awarded their annual
problem-solution prize every year from 1812 to 1822.
II. SECONDARY LITERATURE.
P. F. Hooker, “Benjamin
Gompertz,” in Journal of the Institute of Actuaries,91,
pt. 2, no. 389 (1965), 203-212, is a competent biography with
a complete bibliography of Gompertz's works (twenty-two
titles) and works about him (twenty-four titles). Augustus
De Morgan, “The Old Mathematical Society,” repr. in
J. R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, IV, 2372-2376,
contains a view by a close friend. Also worth reading is
De Morgan's obituary in The Atheneum (22 July 1865),
p. 117. Other informative obituaries are Monthly Notices
of the Royal Astronomical Society,26 (1865), 104-109; and
M. N. Adler, “Memoirs of the Late Benjamin Gompertz,”
in Journal of the Institute of Actuaries,13 (Apr. 1866),
1-20.
HENRY S. TROPP
GOODRICH, EDWIN STEPHEN (b. Weston-super-Mare,
England, 21 June 1868; d. Oxford, England,
6 January 1946), comparative anatomy, embryology,
paleontology, evolution.
Goodrich was a son of Rev. Octavius Pitt Goodrich
and Frances Lucinda Parker. Among his forebears
was Thomas Goodrich, bishop of Ely and lord high
chancellor of England, who helped to draw up the
