Person: Tetens, Johannes Nikolaus
Johannes Tetens was a Danish physicist who made contributions to philosophy and insurance.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- However, Tetens decided to give up an academic life in 1789 and to offer his services to public life.
- Tetens' major academic work was in philosophy.
- Empirical foundations for philosophical studies were of great importance to Tetens and Kant is clearly seen to reiterated some of Tetens' arguments in his famous 1781 masterpiece.
- Slightly earlier, Tetens had published Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie Ⓣ(On the general speculative philosophy) (1775).
- In 1786 Tetens introduced ideas which began progress towards a stochastic approach to life insurance mathematics.
- The expected number of deaths was calculated in 18th century actuarial mathematics (Tetens, 1786) but the method seems to have been forgotten ...
- What Tetens showed was that, given an insurance portfolio with nnn policies, the risk to the portfolio increases with nnn, but the risk to an individual policy decreases in proportion to √n√n√n.
Born 16 September 1736, Tetenbüll (near Tönning), South Schleswig (now Germany). Died 17 August 1807, Copenhagen, Denmark.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Germany
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
