July 10, 2012 | News

Congratulations!

Adam Lenart from the Laboratory of Survival and Longevity has successfully defended his PhD thesis, “The Gompertz Distribution: Characterization and novel applications in formal, economic and statistical demography,” on July 9, 2012, at the University of Rostock. He thesis was awarded with summa cum laude. Adam Lenart examined a mathematical model widely used to describe mortality in demographic research.

In his dissertation, Adam Lenart examined the so-called Gompertz distribution, which is widely used in demographic research. The distribution was developed by the British mathematician Benjamin Gompertz at the beginning of the 19th century. Gompertz showed that the mortality rates of humans increase in a geometrical process. Today, the Gompertz distribution is a standard model used to describe the pattern of adult deaths in demographic research. Even though this pattern has important societal implications and influences political decisions on issues such as raising the retirement age, analytical knowledge about adult deaths was lacking. With his dissertation, Adam Lenart closes this gap, providing a precise characterization of the distribution and an assessment of its fit using mathematical tests.