Benjamin Gompertz

Of the German Jewish family of Gompertz of Emmerich, Gompertz was born in London, where his father and grandfather had been successful diamond merchants. Debarred, as a Jew, from a university education, he studied on his own from an early age, in the writings of Isaac Newton, Colin Maclaurin, and William Emerson. From 1798 he was a prominent contributor to the ''Gentleman's Mathematical Companion'', and for a period won the annual prizes in the magazine for the solutions of problems. Gompertz married Abigail Montefiore (1790–1871) in 1810; they had three children. which was afterwards adopted by the Jewish board of guardians. Gompertz died from a paralytic seizure on 14 July 1865. ==Works==

;Mathematics From 1806 he was a frequent contributor to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; but his early tracts on complex numbers and porisms (1817–18) were self-published. Gompertz was an old-fashioned Newtonian who retained and defended the notation of fluxions. N(t) = N(0) e^{-c (e^{at}-1)},\ where N(t) represents the number of individuals at time t, and c and a are constants. This model is a refinement of a demographic model of Robert Malthus. It was used by insurance companies to calculate the cost of life insurance. The equation, known as a Gompertz curve, is now used in many areas to model a time series where growth is slowest at the start and end of a period. The model has been extended to the Gompertz–Makeham law of mortality. ==See also==