Notes on Whittaker-Henderson Formula A

When Mr. Robert Henderson, 1873-1942, the distinguished life actuary and a Fellow of our Society, put forward "A New Method of Graduation" in 1924, in Transactions XXV of the Actuarial Society of America, the problem of starting values was resolved by calculating upward an auxiliary series which he labeled the u~"" column, alongside the u~,'" column to be graduated. The u,'" column terminated, in an extension of its upper end, in terms deemed acceptable for starting values. These were then copied to the same positions of the Henderson intermediate u~" column to start that column off downward.