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The person who asked the question on math.stackexchange.com referred to news reports, and is asking what is essentially a historical question, so the question r

The person who asked the question on math.stackexchange.com referred to news reports, and is asking what is essentially a historical question, so the question really should have been asked on a question-and-answer site about historical research rather than on a site about mathematics. That's why the answers are so irrelevant to the nature of the question. The Nexis commercial database of news stories may be comprehensive enough these days to answer a question like that in detail going back to your own birth year. It would cost money to do the Nexis search, and you'd probably have to pay someone to pore through the search results and edit a document that would accurately summarize the results, but this should be a solvable problem these days. (As another comment here has already pointed out, the basic answer is "Every time someone becomes the oldest person in the world, that person eventually dies," but I take it that the question actually asked means "How often does the identity of the 'oldest person in the world' change to being a new individual?")

gwern 14y ago
> That's why the answers are so irrelevant to the nature of the question. I posted a historical response there, so hopefully that settles the issue.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Thank you for that. I see the French woman Jeanne Louise Calment (21 February 1875 – 4 August 1997) who long held the title of world's oldest person is an impressive outlier. I heard a description of the life of Calment by a local researcher who participates in longitudinal studies of extreme old age. She outlived her husband, and all her (few) descendants. She only gave up smoking when she became so blind that she could no longer see the end of a cigarette to light it. The researcher told me this story (taken here from Wikipedia) about how she kept living in her house after she became aged and widowed: "In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death."

gwern 14y ago

> That's why the answers are so irrelevant to the nature of the question. I posted a historical response there, so hopefully that settles the issue.

tokenadult 14y ago
Thank you for that. I see the French woman Jeanne Louise Calment (21 February 1875 – 4 August 1997) who long held the title of world's oldest person is an impressive outlier. I heard a description of the life of Calment by a local researcher who participates in longitudinal studies of extreme old age. She outlived her husband, and all her (few) descendants. She only gave up smoking when she became so blind that she could no longer see the end of a cigarette to light it. The researcher told me this story (taken here from Wikipedia) about how she kept living in her house after she became aged and widowed: "In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death."