Arthur Roger Thatcher's contributions to longevity research : a reflexion

International audienceArthur Roger Thatcher, CB, died in London on February 13, 2010, at 83 years of age. He was actively engaged in demographic research until his death. One of his last papers, The Compression of Deaths above the Mode, is published in this volume of Demographic Research (Thatcher et al., 2010). Roger signed the copyright agreement for the paper on January 24, just a few weeks before his death. Another contribution will appear in a forthcoming monograph entitled Supercentenarians (Maier et al., 2010). In this note, we, the co-authors of his Demographic Research paper, will briefly review his remarkable research accomplishments. Roger Thatcher was born in Birmingham in 1926. He worked for 26 years as a statistician in several national government offices. Later, he served as Registrar General for England and Wales, and was Director of the Office of Population Censuses and Survey (OPCS) from 1978 to 1986. A short description of his professional career up to his retirement can be found in Population Trends (1986). He had a long-standing affinity for the history of actuarial sciences and statistics in England, taking particular interest in the early years of the Statistical Society of London, and helping to compile extracts from its 1830s Proceedings (see Boreham et al., 1988 and Rosenbaum, 2001). He published a historical (1970) of British labour-force statistics back to 1886. Thatcher was also a scientist with broad interests, publishing papers in a wide range of fields, such as archaeology, mathematics (number theory), and cosmology (1972, 1973 and 1982)