Over the past century human life expectancy has risen substantially around the world, and longevity in the modern world is largely determined by the age at which adults die. There is an ongoing, longstanding trend to higher average ages at death for both sexes in most countries. Accompanying...

In the past six decades, lifespan inequality has varied greatly within and among countries even while life expectancy has continued to increase. How and why does mortality change generate this diversity? We derive a precise link between changes in age-specific mortality and lifespan inequality,...

Entropy, or the gradual decline through age in the survivorship function, reflects the considerable amount of variance in length of life found in any human population. Part is due to the well-known variation in life expectancy between groups: large differences according to race, sex,...