Description: The objectives of this paper are: 1. To show why scientific laws of mortality are preferable to the continued use of graduation techniques on mortality tables. 2. To develop a new theory leading to a new mathematical law of mortality that reduces to Gompertz's law as a first approximation. 3. To demonstrate an understanding of select mortality and produce a simple formula that is reasonably consistent with it. 4. To develop methods to test this and other similar formulas on various bodies of data to establish their validity and usefulness. 5. To discuss the meaning of the results and provide some examples of the use of the formula for purposes other than graduation. 6. To discuss extensions of the models. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 32.

Description: An increasing need exists for the actuary to provide ranges and frequency distributions of possible values instead of providing only mean values. This discussion will cover: projections of asset experience under various economic scenarios, a practical application of profit analysis using scenarios and a deterministic model, exploring possible values by means of stochastic modeling, and a description of the new life contingencies textbook's stochastic approach and application to some practical population and census problems. From Record of the Society of Actuaries 1981, Volume 7, No. 4.

Description: This 1979 session is about recent advances in Prediction Theory. Topics included: 1. Statistical methods to predict path properties of a Time Series. 2. How and to what extent Box-Jenkins Time Series methods can be modified to predict two or more time series simultaneously. 3. Workable techniques that are already being successfully used in practice.

Description: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. This session offers a retrospective and prospective look at the development of actuarial pricing models and technology tools.