The 7 Most Important Equations for Your Retirement: The Fascinating People and Ideas Behind Planning Your Retirement Income

CONCLUSION

CONTROVERSIES, OMISSIONS AND CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Getting an equation named after you isn't easy. Unlike a building, hospital ward or even a business school, money can't buy you this sort of fame. Being brilliant, or a genius, is necessary but probably not sufficient for equation immortality. You need to be a good communicator and very prolific. Having many students to build on your breakthroughs certainly helps. But most importantly, you must own a very sharp set of knives.

A number of our seven champions spent the latter part of life defending their claims to originality. In many cases the waters were muddied regarding who got there first, and it's only with the passage of time that historians have bestowed the credit posthumously.

For example, there are some historians who claim the 5th-century Indian Sanskrit text Aryabhatiya should be properly credited for introducing the decimal system to the world, or that the ancient Chinese deserve credit for many of the ideas attributed to Fibonacci. In fact, Liber Abaci was lost for many years and there are still those who are skeptical he actually invented the technique for computing the time value of money.

In 1832, an Englishman by the name of T.R. Edmonds started a vicious letter-writing campaign to discredit Benjamin Gompertz and his famed law of mortality. Edmonds claimed he had discovered an earlier and better version. ...