Anderson Gray McKendrick

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Anderson Gray McKendrick (born September 8, 1876 in Edinburgh , † May 30, 1943 in Carrbridge , Inverness-shire ) was a British medic ( epidemiologist ) and stochastic .

Life

McKendrick was the son of John Gray McKendrick , a Fellow of Physiology Professor of the Royal Society, and Mary Souttar. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Glasgow , where his father had become a professor . McKendrick studied medicine in Glasgow with a degree in 1900 (Bachelor in Medicine and Surgery) and then went to India (Indian Medical Service, IMS) as a doctor. Before leaving, he went to Sierra Leone to support the doctor Ronald Ross in his investigations into fighting malaria . Ross was active in the mathematical modeling of malaria (for example in the appendix of his book on malaria 1911) and had thereby also an influence on the future direction of McKendrick's research. During his stay in India, he also did his military service on an expedition against the Mahdi insurgents in Sudan and Somalia , where he developed a tank for a safe water supply. In India he was stationed in Nadia in Bengal. where, among other things, he fought dysentery in prison. From 1905 he switched to state research at the Pasteur Institute in Kausali in the Punjab . Among other things, he did research on rabies vaccination (paper with WF Harvey 1907). He became Lieutenant-Colonel of the IMS, was at the Pasteur Institute in Coonoor , was a statistician with the government in Shimla and finally director of the Pasteur Institute in Kausali. During the First World War he dealt with infectious diseases. After falling ill with tropical sprue, he retired from the IMS and moved to Edinburgh with his family of four children in 1920, where he became superintendent of the laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh , which he stayed for twenty years. The laboratory was supported in part by the Carnegie Trust. It was there that he began working with William Ogilvy Kermack on mathematical epidemiology, then a biochemist at McKendrick's laboratory. He also published on rabies control. In 1941 he retired.

plant

He and William Ogilvy Kermack were a pioneer in the development of mathematical models in epidemiology ( SIR model , also Kermack-McKendrick model). He began with it in a 1912 publication on malaria, 1914 (in which he also described Poisson processes, birth and death processes), in a 1926 publication on cholera infection in contaminated wells in India and the role of Poisson statistics and before but mainly in the publications with Kermack from 1927. Further of his 58 publications concerned malaria, rabies, statistics and demography (death rates in Great Britain and Sweden).

In his essay from 1926 he also introduced a partial differential equation named after him and Heinz von Foerster (partly only after Foerster) for the development of a population in time and according to the age distribution:

with a death rate depending on age.

In 1911 he applied the logistic equation (though not the first) to study bacterial growth.

Honors and memberships

In 1912 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1924 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He received a doctorate degree (D. Sc.).

literature

  • WF Harvey: Anderson Gray McKendrick 1876-1943. Edinburgh Med. J., Volume 50, 1943, pp. 500–506 (with the list of his publications)
  • JO Irwin: The Place of Mathematics in Medical and Biological Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), Vol. 126, No. 1, 1963, pp. 1-45.
  • J. Gani: The early use of stochastic methods: an historical note on McKendrick's pioneering papers. In: G. Kallianpur, PR Krishnaiah, JK Gosh (Ed.), Statistics and Probability: Essays in honor of CRRao, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1982, pp. 263-268.
  • J. Aitchison, GS Watson: A not-so-plain tale from the Raj. In: DA Dow (Ed.), Contribution to The Influence of Scottish Medicine, Parthenon Publishing Group, Carnforth, Lancs., UK, 1988, pp. 113-128
  • K. Dietz: Introduction to McKendrick (1926) Applications of mathematics to medical problems. In: S. Kotz, NL Johnson (ed.), Breakthroughs in Statistics, Vol. III, Springer-Verlag, 1997, pp. 17-26.
  • J. Gani: Anderson Gray McKendrick, in: CC Heyde, E. Seneta (Eds.): Statisticians of the Centuries, 2001, pp. 323-327.
  • Warren M. Hirsch: McKendrick, Anderson Gray (1876–1943), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ McKendrick, On certain mathematical aspects of malaria, Paludism, Volume 1, 1912, pp. 54-66
  2. ^ McKendrick, Studies on the theory of continuous probabilities, with special reference to its bearing on natural phenomena of a progressive nature, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Volume 13, 1914, pp. 401-416
  3. ↑ McKendrick, Applications of mathematics to medical problems, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, Volume 44, 1926, pp. 98-130, reprinted and commented in Kotz, Johnson (Ed.), Breakthroughs in Statistics, Volume 3, Springer 1997
  4. ↑ McKendrick, Kermack, A contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics I. Proc. Roy. Soc. A, Volume 115, 1927, pp. 700-721, Part 2, Volume 138, 1932, pp. 55-83, Part 3, Volume 141, 1933, SS 94-122, this work was published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Vol 53, 1991, pp. 33-55, 57-87, 89-118
  5. ↑ AG McKendrick, M. Kesava Pai: XLV.-The rate of multiplication of micro-organisms: A Mathematical Study, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Volume 31, 1912, pp 649-653.
personal data
SURNAME McKendrick, Anderson Gray
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British epidemiologist and stochastic
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1943
Place of death Carrbridge