Thomas Galloway

Scottish mathematician (1796–1851), actuary of the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office from 1833 until his death, worth a hub because a second, concurrent career makes him the vault's tightest instance of a recurring shape. As the Amicable's registrar he produced, in 1841, a fuller analysis of the Society's mortality experience than Pensam's original 1811 compilation. Across the same two decades he held office in the Royal Astronomical Society — Fellow from 1829, vice-president in 1837 and 1848, secretary in 1847 — and won the Royal Society's 1848 Royal Medal for a memoir on the solar system's own proper motion (claim-galloway-royal-medal-astronomer-1848).

He was not among the Institute of Actuaries' 1848 founding cohort (first president John Finlaison, 1848–1860), so his two institutional worlds — a life office and the Royal Astronomical Society — never formally overlapped; the overlap is only in the one man.

That the actuarial and astronomical careers ran simultaneously, not sequentially, is what makes Galloway a third instance of the vault's one-person-two-lineages pattern, after Halley and Price.

References

• claim-galloway-royal-medal-astronomer-1848
• observation-galloway-is-a-third-astronomer-actuary-instance
• claim-pensam-1811-amicable-experience-first-assured-lives-mortality-data
• question-verify-galloway-royal-medal-astronomer-primary — open