Benjamin Gompertz FRS (5 March 1779 – 14 July 1865) was an English self-educated mathematician and actuary, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Debarred, as a Jew, from a university education, he studied on his own from an early age, in the writings of Isaac Newton, Colin Maclaurin, and William Emerson.

From 1798 he was a prominent contributor to the Gentleman's Mathematical Companion, and for a period won the annual prizes in the magazine for the solutions of problems.

His brother-in-law Sir Moses Montefiore with his relative Nathan Mayer Rothschild then founded the Alliance Assurance Company (1824), and Gompertz was appointed actuary under the deed of settlement.

His management of the Alliance Company was successful, he was consulted by government, and made computations for the Army medical board.

[2] From 1806 he was a frequent contributor to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; but his early tracts on complex numbers and porisms (1817–18) were self-published.

With Francis Baily he began in 1822 the construction of tables for the mean places of the fixed stars; the work was left uncompleted, because of the publication of the Fundamenta Astronomiæ of Friedrich Bessel.

The equation, known as a Gompertz curve, is now used in many areas to model a time series where growth is slowest at the start and end of a period.