From John Graunt to Adolphe Quetelet: on the Origins Of Demography

0585036 - ÚI 2025 CZ eng A - Abstract
Kalina, Jan
From John Graunt to Adolphe Quetelet: on the Origins Of Demography.
16th INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE RELIK 2023: Book of Abstracts. Prague: University of Economics and Business, 2023 - (Langhamrová, J.; Vrabcová, J.). s. 26-26
[RELIK 2023: Reproduction of Human Capital - mutual links and connections /16./. 23.11.2023-24.11.2023, Praha]
Institutional support: RVO:67985807

John Graunt (1620-1674) and Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) were two important personalities, who contributed to the origins of demography. As they both developed statistical techniques for the analysis of demographic data, they are important also from the point of view of history of statistics. The contributions of both Graunt and Quetelet especially to the development of mortality tables and models are recalled in this paper. Already from the 17th century, the available mortality tables were exploited for computing life annuities. Also the contribution of selected personalities inspired by Graunt are recalled here; the work of Christian Huygens, Jacob Bernoulli, or Abraham de Moivre is discussed to document that the historical development of statistics and probability theory was connected with the development of demography.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0352802