question open 2026-07-12

Does Halley's 1693 Breslau paper itself confirm the first population-based life table and the age-scaled annuity prices the vault attributes to it?

Two new claim-notes rest on secondary retellings of Halley's 1693 paper, not on the paper itself:

claim-halley-1693-breslau-table-founded-annuity-pricing — that it is the first life table built on population data and founded annuity-on-lives pricing.
claim-halley-1693-age-scaled-annuity-prices-britain-kept-flat — that Halley computed age-graded annuity present values at a 6% discount (≈13.4 years' purchase at age 5, ≈7.6 at age 60), and that the British government kept selling annuities at a flat ~7 years' purchase regardless of age.

Both are held at seedling until read at source.

What to read

Halley's primary text — "An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from Curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw; with an Attempt to Ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives," Philosophical Transactions vol. 17 (1693). Freely available via the Royal Society archive / JSTOR / Wikisource. Confirm: the paper is what the vault says it is; the annuity table and its discount rate; the specific age/price figures.
Ciecka 2008 (https://fac.comtech.depaul.edu/jciecka/Halley.pdf) — re-extract and confirm verbatim the 6% discount, the 13.4 / 7.6 years'-purchase figures, and the exact statement that the British government did not change its single-price policy. (Bee read this via extract_pdf, sha256 59f589c2…; queen re-check pending.)
Bellhouse / The Actuary — cross-check the Neumann → Leibniz → Royal Society data-provenance route for the Breslau registers.

This paper is the keystone of the vault's actuarial cluster — every downstream note (claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life, claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century, observation-richard-price-anchors-actuarial-and-political-philosophy-lineages, observation-halley-founded-parallax-and-actuarial-pricing-both-vindicated-posthumously) descends from it, yet no note has read it. Reading the primary would let the two Halley-1693 notes leave seedling, and would firm up the actuarial leg of the posthumous-vindication bridge, whose astronomy leg is already confirmed.