Volume 22 - Article 18 | Pages 539–548  

Arthur Roger Thatcher's contributions to longevity research: A Reflexion

By Jean-Marie Robine, Siu Lan Karen Cheung, Shiro Horiuchi

Abstract

Arthur Roger Thatcher, CB, died in London on February 13, 2010, at 83 years of age. He was actively engaged in demographic research until his death. One of his last papers, The Compression of Deaths above the Mode, is published in this volume of Demographic Research (Thatcher et al., 2010). Roger signed the copyright agreement for the paper on January 24, just a few weeks before his death. Another contribution will appear in a forthcoming monograph entitled Supercentenarians (Maier et al., 2010). In this note, we, the co-authors of his Demographic Research paper, will briefly review his remarkable research accomplishments.
Roger Thatcher was born in Birmingham in 1926. He worked for 26 years as a statistician in several national government offices. Later, he served as Registrar General for England and Wales, and was Director of the Office of Population Censuses and Survey (OPCS) from 1978 to 1986. A short description of his professional career up to his retirement can be found in Population Trends (1986).
He had a long-standing affinity for the history of actuarial sciences and statistics in England, taking particular interest in the early years of the Statistical Society of London, and helping to compile extracts from its 1830s Proceedings (see Boreham et al., 1988 and Rosenbaum, 2001). He published a historical abstract (1970) of British labour-force statistics back to 1886. Thatcher was also a scientist with broad interests, publishing papers in a wide range of fields, such as archaeology, mathematics (number theory), and cosmology (1972, 1973 and 1982).

Author’s Affiliation

• Jean-Marie Robine - Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), France EMAIL
• Siu Lan Karen Cheung - University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong EMAIL
• Shiro Horiuchi - City University of New York, United States of America EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

The compression of deaths above the mode
Volume 22 - Article 17

Dissecting the compression of mortality in Switzerland, 1876-2005
Volume 21 - Article 19

The question of the human mortality plateau: Contrasting insights by longevity pioneers
Volume 48 - Article 11

The mystery of Japan's missing centenarians explained
Volume 26 - Article 11

Occupational inequalities in health expectancies in France in the early 2000s: Unequal chances of reaching and living retirement in good health
Volume 25 - Article 12

Tempo effect on age-specific death rates
Volume 13 - Article 8

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

A comprehensive database of estimates and forecasts of Spanish sex–age death rates by climate area, income level, and habitat size (2010–2050)
Volume 52 - Article 1    | Keywords: georeferenced predictions, life tables, longevity, mortality trends, risk factors

On the relationship between life expectancy, modal age at death, and the threshold age of the life table entropy
Volume 51 - Article 24    | Keywords: Gompertz law, life expectancy, lifespan variation, longevity, mode, mortality

Ageing and diversity: Inequalities in longevity and health in low-mortality countries
Volume 50 - Article 12    | Keywords: aging, health, lifespan inequality, longevity, old-age threshold, regional differences, socioeconomic status

Longevity à la mode: A discretized derivative tests method for accurate estimation of the adult modal age at death
Volume 50 - Article 11    | Keywords: longevity, mathematical demography, modal age at death

The contributions of stochastic demography and social inequality to lifespan variability
Volume 49 - Article 13    | Keywords: heterogeneity, inequality, lifetime reproduction, longevity, stochasticity, variance decomposition