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	Gompertz-Makeham Law of Mortality	Heligman-Pollard Model
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Regression model	Regression model
Year of origin	1860	1980
Originator	Benjamin Gompertz & William Makeham	Larry Heligman & John H. Pollard
Type	Parametric mortality (hazard) law for adult ages	Parametric whole-lifespan mortality law
Seminal source	Gompertz, B. (1825). On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 115, 513–583.	Heligman, L., & Pollard, J. H. (1980). The age pattern of mortality. Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, 107(1), 49–80.
Aliases	Gompertz-Makeham Model, Makeham's Law, Gompertz Law of Mortality, Gompertz-Makeham Ölümlülük Yasası	Heligman-Pollard Mortality Law, Eight-Parameter Mortality Model, HP Mortality Model, Heligman-Pollard Ölümlülük Modeli
Related	4	4
Summary	The Gompertz-Makeham law is the foundational parametric model of adult human mortality. Benjamin Gompertz showed in 1825 that the force of mortality rises exponentially with age, and William Makeham added an age-independent background term in 1860 to account for deaths from causes unrelated to ageing. The combined law expresses the hazard of death as a constant plus an exponentially increasing component, capturing the dominant shape of adult mortality with just three parameters.	The Heligman-Pollard model is an eight-parameter parametric law that describes the age pattern of mortality across the entire human lifespan in a single equation. Introduced by Larry Heligman and John Pollard in 1980, it represents the odds of dying at each age as the sum of three additive components — a rapidly declining childhood term, a young-adult accident hump, and an exponentially rising senescent term — capturing the full characteristic shape of the mortality curve from birth to old age.