Anderson Gray McKendrick

Anderson Gray McKendrick (8 September 1876 – 30 May 1943) was a Scottish physician and epidemiologist pioneered the use of mathematical methods in epidemiology. Irwin (see below) commented on the quality of his work, "Although an amateur, he was a brilliant mathematician, with a far greater insight than many professionals."

McKendrick was born in Edinburgh the fifth and last child of John Gray McKendrick FRS, a distinguished physiologist. The son trained as a doctor at the University of Glasgow and joined the Indian Medical Service. He worked with Ronald Ross and eventually would continue his work on mathematical epidemiology. His primary interest was in research and he became director of the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli in the Punjab. He was invalided home to Britain in 1920 and settled in Edinburgh where he became Superintendent of the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He held this post for the rest of his life.

McKendrick's career as a mathematical epidemiologist began in India. In 1911, McKendrick rediscovered the logistic equation and fit it to bacterial growth data. In 1914 he published a paper in which he gave equations for the pure birth process and a particular birth-death process. After his return to Scotland he published more. His 1926 paper, 'Applications of mathematics to medical problems' was particularly impressive, including the widely used McKendrick–Von Foerster partial differential equation

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