Death, Money, Mathematics : life insurance in France (1780-1840)

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Caroline Ehrhardt (Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis)
• Tuesday 21 January 2025, 14:30-15:30
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact nobody.

MHMW01 - Modern history of mathematics: emerging themes

Numerous works published in the last two decades have considered mathematical activity from the point of view the practices to which it gives rise, but the question of the social and economic anchorage in which this activity is embedded more often than not remains a blind spot. By examining the trajectories and productions of actors trained in mathematics (and sometimes even active in this field) and employed by insurance companies in France between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, this talk aims to build bridges between the history of mathematics and economic and social history.   I will focus on the professional dimension of the application of statistics and probability to insurance and pension issues, to better understand how mathematical activity can take place in the context of white-collar work, as professional work whose objective is not the development of mathematics per se, but the production of value. The mathematics of insurance, later to be known as actuarial science, provides an ideal opportunity to study not only  the practice of mathematics as a necessary technique for the conduct of economic activities, but also the mechanisms on which such practice is based, the concrete acts of intellectual work that it induces, and the way in which it both fits into and reinforces social hierarchies and sales arguments. 

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All CMS events
• Featured lists
• INI info aggregator
• Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series
• School of Physical Sciences
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.