James Dodson (mathematician)

James Dodson was a British mathematician, actuary and innovator in the insurance industry, born about 1705 and dead on 23 November 1757. A pupil of Abraham de Moivre according to Matthew Maty, he worked as an accountant and teacher, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1755 and in the same year master of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital. In 1742 he published The Anti-Logarithmic Canon, a table of eleven-figure numbers corresponding to all logarithms under 100,000 that was unique until 1849, and from 1747 he published The Calculator and The Mathematical Miscellany. Refused admission to the Amicable Society because of his age, he developed the actuarial principles, building on Halley's mortality tables, on which the Equitable Life Assurance Society was founded in 1762.