Fictional actuaries

Fictional actuaries and the appearance of actuaries in works of fiction has been the subject of a number of articles in actuarial journals.

Actuaries in film

• Double Indemnity (1944) a Billy Wilder film , with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, was possibly the first to feature an actuary. The plot revolves around a murder that seeks to gain advantage from a rather peculiar insurance policy. An insurance investigator (Edward G. Robinson) knows the actuarial statistics and becomes suspicious.
• Are You With It? (1948) is musical comedy featuring Donald O'Connor as an actuary who is forced to join a carnival after misplacing a decimal point on a statistical table.
• Sweet Charity (1969) is a film that documents the romantic life of an actuary, played by John McMartin with Shirley MacLaine as his love interest.
• The Billion Dollar Bubble (1976) - the Equity Funding scandal retold in the form of a movie starring James Woods.
• Class Action (1991) - featured Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as father and daughter lawyers on opposite sides of a massive class action law suit. Actuarial analysis plays a key role in the outcome.
• Escape Clause (1996) - Andrew McCarthy plays Richard Ramsay in an actuarial thriller. To quote TVguide.com "The makers of this direct-to-video release thought the world was ready for a thriller about an insurance actuary. They thought wrong."[1]
• Fight Club (1999) - Edward Norton plays the character Jack, who briefly describes in a scene aboard an airplane, that his job entails the assessment of risk associated with car accidents for an insurance company. Even though not explicitly stated, he performs the job of an actuary.
• Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001) starring Matthew McConaughey - The lives of a lawyer, an actuary, a housecleaner, a professor, and the people around them intersect as they ponder order and happiness in the face of life's cold unpredictability.
• About Schmidt (2002) - Warren Schmidt is portrayed by Jack Nicholson. The movie mostly covers Schmidt's retirement from an insurance company, and his adventures after his retirement.
• Along Came Polly (2004) - Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller) is a risk assessment expert, and though not explicitly stated, performs the job of an actuary.

References to actuaries

• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), A door at the insurance office where Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe) works is labeled, "Edward Conners, Actuary."
• The Apartment (1960), starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine: “In 1957, we had an employee here, name of Fowler. He was very popular too. Turned out he was running a bookie joint in the actuarial department. Tying up our switchboard using our IBM machines to figure the odds. So the day before the Kentucky Derby, I called in the vice squad and we raided the 13th floor.”
• Tron (1982), which featured an actuarial program named Ram as one of the supporting cast of characters - doomed to a fairly early demise in the film.
• Fletch (1985), Fletch (Chevy Chase) tells Marvin Stanwyck that the actuary needs a picture of his son.
• Groundhog Day (1993). The anti-hero, Phil Connors (Bill Murray), repeatedly crosses the path of an annoying insurance salesman, Ned “Needlenose” Ryerson. At one point, Ned exclaims, "I got friends who live and die by the actuarial tables!"
• First Daughter (2004), The guy Katie Holmes' character falls in love with says his major is actuarial science. Katie Holmes responds with, "What actually is actuarial science?" and he says, "Statistics, probability and assessment of risk. But more importantly, uh, it's what my dad did. And what his dad did. So, that's what I'm gonna do."
• Stranger than Fiction (2006), Will Ferrell plays a lonely, numbers-obsessed IRS tax collector, who responds to whether he has any family or friends by saying, "I used to be engaged to an auditor, but she left me for an actuary."

Actuaries in theater

• I Love You Because (2006) - In this musical, one of the major characters, Diana Bingley (an actuary), suggests some formula-based "dating rules" to her friend Marcy in the key number "The Actuary Song."

Actuaries on television

• The Collector (2004) had an episode titled "The Actuary". In this episode, an actuary uses the Devil's powers to predict the exact lifespan, whereabouts and circumstances of others to help mobsters rub out the competition. [2]
• Gilmore Girls (2000) in the episode "Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers," Lorelai's mom sets her up on a date with an actuary called Chase Bradford, played by Paul Cassell.
• In Kim Possible: A Sitch in Time, Ron's father's job is not an obstacle to the family moving to Norway (and, in the future, the moon). Quote: "I'm an actuary. I can work anywhere people attach a dollar value to human life."
• Numb3rs (2005), in the episode titled "Sacrifice," Professor Charlie Eppes refers to actuarial science.
• NYPD Blue recurring character, Dr. Jennifer Devlin (character John Clark's blond bipolar love interest), stated that her father is an actuary.
• "Probability" is a Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode featuring Mark Linn-Baker as Wally Stevens, an insurance investigator whose work is often described in the context of performing actuarial calculations.
• Profiler (1996–1999) had an episode about a disturbed actuary. The episode was titled "Perfect Helen". It is in Volume 2 of Season 3 on DVD.
• The Robinsons is a sitcom about a reinsurance actuary, Ed Robinson (played by Martin Freeman), who realises that reinsurance is not his passion and decides to rethink his life [3]
• In the third episode of The Shield (2002) called "The Spread", the police interrogate a rapist who claims to be an actuary.
• The Wild Wild West (1968) - had an episode titled The Night of the Avaricious Actuary[4]
• Ghost Whisperer (Series 4) in the episode "Thrilled to death", an actuary who is terminally ill dies and his ghost haunts his neighbour.

Actuaries in literature

• The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman portrays actuaries as prophets who predict the future, and are organized into various guilds. These Hodgman actuaries have various ethics, such as not predicting the date of one's own death.
• The comic series, Batman, featured a villain named the Actuary: (Detective Comics #683-4 (March–April 1995)): A mathematical genius who applies formulae to aid the Penguin in committing crimes.
• In Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, the main character, Minerva Dobbs, is a thirty-something actuary looking for love.
• Un Certain Monsieur Blot by Pierre Daninos. Mr. Blot is an actuary, who wins a competition as the most average man in France. The book includes the acerbic observation that “there were two kinds of actuaries – those who were still doing actuarial work and those who had found something better to do.”
• The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are part of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld fantasy series and feature Twoflower, the "actuary and world’s first tourist."
• The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov is often considered one of the greatest science fiction works of all time^{[citation needed]} and features "psycho-historians," a sort of hidden priesthood that manipulates politics and economics on a galactic scale to accomplish the goals of peace and prosperity. Part of the theory is that on a planetary scale, people are not predictable but on a galactic scale, the law of large numbers (i.e., the Central Limit Theorem) is valid and therefore, the reactions of the galactic civilization, as a whole, are predictable. Given the characteristics of psycho-historians, they are very much like actuaries.
• Industrial Magic, by Kelley Armstrong, introduces a character called Reuben Aldrich as the head of the actuarial department at a supernatural organisation, and suggests he is also a necromancer.
• The Infinite Shoeblack by Norman MacOwan. The hero (played by Leslie Banks) was a poverty stricken student of the Faculty of Actuaries innocently residing in an Edinburgh brothel. [5]
• Mrs. Warren's Profession - "I shall set up in chambers in the City and work at actuarial calculations and conveyancing.’ So says Vivie, the daughter of the eponymous heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play.[6]
• Preferred Risk, by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey (under the pseudonym Edson McCann), describes a dystopian future dominated by the insurance industry; in Pohl's own words, "the one novel I wrote with Lester del Rey, which was called Preferred Risk, took a year out of my life. It's a terrible book. If you come across it, don't read it." [7]

Actuaries in manga

• "Homunculus", by Hideo Yamamoto, features Susumu Nakoshi as the story's protagonist. He was an actuary before he told people he was going on an extended vacation. Instead, he lived in an old car parked between an affluent hotel and a homeless reside. He resigns later in the story, and his reason for throwing his job away is still unknown.
• "Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service" featured a malevolent actuary who uses statistics to determine scenarios that will most likely result in the death of particular individuals.

Actuaries in video games

• In Portal 2 (2011) the character GLaDOS dryly taunts the player with the line, "we've got a lot to do, and only sixty more years to do it. More or less. I don't have the actuarial tables in front of me." [8]

Other

• The Society of Actuaries holds a speculative actuarial fiction contest [9]
• The documentary Wordplay - which explores the world of crossword makers and aficionados - makes reference to actuaries as one of three occupations which are particularly adept at crossword solving.

See also

• Actuary

References

• Actuary Australia ("Two Ducks" column - September 2003, November 2003 April 2004, May 2004 editions)