Author: grant

What is so bad about being an actuary?

Over the past couple of months I’ve done some very informal research on what it means to be an actuary. From reading the Wikipedia article and also the Be An Actuary website it seems like a pretty interesting job. Here is where it gets surprising, though: nearly everyone I know in the insurance industry has communicated that it is a very lonely and boring job. This leaves my question to you: what is so bad about being an actuary?
Here are two other links I’ve yet to research: Society of Actuaries and Casuality Actuarial Society (thanks Dr. Rowe), and clearly I need to do more.

fmt 0.7 Released

fmtis

A library of procedures for formatting Scheme objects to text in various ways, and for easily concatenating, composing and extending these formatters efficiently without resorting to capturing and manipulating intermediate strings.

This release also addresses a long-time pet peeve of mine – you can now format exact non-integral rationals to arbitrary precision. Rationals provide extended precision, but until now it was always difficult to see that precision in a human-readable manner.

(via ikarus)

Mid Term Probability Update

In the first half of the semester in the Probability course I am taking we learned (among other things) how to, given the probability distribution function for any distribution, derive, if possible, the:

Everyone seems to be excited about the second half of the semester when we will start building on this foundation.