Description: This section contains book reviews and a select bibliography. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1973, Vol. 25, Pt. 1, No. 73. Book topics include statistics, quantitative methods for determining IBNR, and Investing for a Financial Institution. Other books on actuarial and insurance topics are briefly discussed.

Description: This paper is from Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1955 Volume 7, Number 17. The author notes that recent advances in calculating equipment make possible producing graduations much more elaborate than any done previously. The paper confines itself to the problem of graduating a single column of rates, such as an ultimate column, using a Whittaker-Henderson B graduation of the fourth order. The author provides a detailed description of the process with significant mathematical theory.

Description: This paper is from Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1955 Volume 7, Number 17. The author notes that in mortality studies the ‘natural’ unit for exposures and deaths is number of lives, but often more insight is gained by use of other weights, such as face amount. In this paper, the author develops a method which, ‘by a combination of exposed to risk formulas, provides a comparatively simple procedure to permit consideration of weights which vary during the observation period.’

Description: This paper is from the Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1956 Volume 8, Number 20. It was presented at the 1956 Spring Meetings of the Society of Actuaries for discussion. The author presents an outline of how difficulties in the determination of a frequency distribution of the expected costs may be overcome by, in part, applying the concept of using a series of random numbers with a view of making mortality studies for each life in a group of annuitants. The paper also presents the results of some experiments which were designed to discover whether or not the concept could be conducted on an IBM 650 electronic data processing machine.