Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Laurence Fogelbaum here. Having a legacy is nice, but what
Speaker 1: of the discovery that bears your name and perpetuity is
Speaker 1: something that predicts the death of every human on the planet.
Speaker 1: The thought didn't really seem to bother Benjamin Gomperts much.
Speaker 1: Gumperts wasn't a fortune teller or the Grim Reaper or anything.
Speaker 1: He was an actuary, someone who calculates the financial risk
Speaker 1: and insurance company assumes by ensuring people. But the mortality
Speaker 1: equation he formulated in is still our most useful tool
Speaker 1: for describing how humans and many other animals die out
Speaker 1: over time, and what the gum Parts law of mortality
Speaker 1: tells us can be just as chilling today as it
Speaker 1: was then. Gumparts was born in London in seventeen seventy
Speaker 1: nine to a successful diamond dealer. Though the family was
Speaker 1: wealthy enough, they were also Jewish, which excluded Benjamin from
Speaker 1: studying at a university at that time. But boy did
Speaker 1: that kid ever love math, and so he taught himself
Speaker 1: dogged Lisa, mimitting papers to math publications throughout his early career.
Speaker 1: While working a day job at the London Stock Exchange,
Speaker 1: but what he really wanted was to be an actuary,
Speaker 1: a vocation that would allow him to combine his obsessions
Speaker 1: with math, statistics and financial theory. Unfortunately, nobody would hire
Speaker 1: Gumparts because of his religion. In eighteen twenty four, he
Speaker 1: quit the stock market following the death of his ten
Speaker 1: year old son, and he was subsequently hired as an
Speaker 1: actuary for his brother in law's new insurance company. The
Speaker 1: next year, he submitted a paper to the Royal Society
Speaker 1: entitled on the Nature of the function Expressive of the
Speaker 1: Law of Human Mortality and on a New Mode of
Speaker 1: Determining the Value of Life Contingencies. In it, he suggested
Speaker 1: that for most of our adult lives are chances of
Speaker 1: dying increase exponentially as we age. It wasn't good news,
Speaker 1: but it got people's attention. Gumparts pretty much nailed the
Speaker 1: way to calculate age specific death rates. Of course, he
Speaker 1: did it to help his insurance company figure out the
Speaker 1: appropriate rates for buying and selling annuities, but perhaps the
Speaker 1: death of his only son drove him to a more
Speaker 1: comprehensive understanding of the age related trends behind death. Either way,
Speaker 1: Gumperts gave us an equation stating that after around age thirty,
Speaker 1: the odds of a person buying the farm roughly doubles
Speaker 1: every eight years, So assuming you were at least thirty
Speaker 1: eight years ago, you were half as likely to croak
Speaker 1: then as you are today. Nobody has been able to
Speaker 1: prove this equation wrong for nearly two hundred years, although
Speaker 1: another British actuary named William Makeum came along about a
Speaker 1: half a century after Gumperts and added a good bit
Speaker 1: to the original math that calculates one's risk of death
Speaker 1: assuming equal risk for everybody of dying from certain specific dangers,
Speaker 1: no matter what age we are. In case you were wondering,
Speaker 1: Benjamin Gumperts died at the ripe old age of eighty six.
Speaker 1: Oh and his equation works for pretty much all mammals
Speaker 1: after they reach sexual maturity. The only one that straight
Speaker 1: up defies it is the naked mole rat. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Jesselyne Shields and produced by Tyler Playing.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other topics, including
Speaker 1: what the heck is up with naked mule raths, visit
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