Louis Israel Dublin

Biography Dublin was born in Kovno, Russian Empire. He came to the U.S. in 1886 with his parents Max and Sarah (Rosensweig). Dublin obtained his bachelor's in 1901 at City College of New York. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1904. He married Augusta Salik on April 5, 1908. Dublin taught at Yale as a lecturer in vital statistics. In 1924 served as president of the American Statistical Association.

He died in Winter Park, Orange County, Florida at the age of 86.

Body Mass Index While serving as a vice president at Met Life Insurance and as a statistician Dublin developed a height for weight table based on longevity of life insurance holders in the early 1940s. These tables would later develop into the Body Mass Index developed by University of Minnesota's cholesterol and heart disease physiology researcher Ancel Keys in 1972. Keys intended the BMI to be used only for the study of groups and not to be applied to individuals. The index is statistically very limited in usefulness as covered a very limited demographic of people who were able to afford life insurance and who were mostly white.

Major works Louis Israel Dublin, Alfred J. Lotka: The Money Value of a Man (Public Health in America Series). New York : Arno Press, 1977 (Repr. of the 1930 ed. by the Ronald Press Co., New York). with Lee K. Frankel and Miles M. Dawson, Workingmen's Insurance in Europe, 1910 with Lee K. Frankel, Principles of Life Insurance, 1911 Collected papers at the Archives, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland