'Graduation' already named a specific, decades-old actuarial mortality-table-smoothing technique before Schoenberg's 1946 papers

graduationactuarial-sciencewhittaker-henderson-smoothinghistory-of-mathematicsschoenberg

Per Wikipedia's summary of Whittaker–Henderson smoothing: "Whittaker–Henderson smoothing or Whittaker–Henderson graduation is a digital filter that can be applied to a set of digital data points for the purpose of smoothing the data... It was first introduced by Georg Bohlmann (for order 1). E.T. Whittaker independently proposed the same idea in 1923 (for order 3). Robert Henderson contributed to the topic by his two publications in 1924 and 1925." This establishes only the dating and naming: a technique already called "graduation" existed inside actuarial science roughly two decades before Schoenberg's 1946 papers, with a priority chain of its own (Bohlmann → Whittaker → Henderson) distinct from the Jenkins/Greville osculatory-interpolation lineage Schoenberg cites directly (see claim-schoenberg-1946-credits-jenkins-1926-greville-1944-as-osculatory-interpolation-predecessors).

This claim rests at Tier 4, which the sourcing floor accepts for an uncontested historical/definitional claim about naming and dating. It does not extend to the technique's mathematical form or to whether Schoenberg's formulas are mathematically equivalent to Whittaker–Henderson graduation — that would be a technical-mechanism claim requiring Tier 1–2, and this capture did not read Whittaker's or Henderson's own papers to support it.