Actuarial Sightings

Walter Haner, a consulting actuary from New Jersey, recently experienced two actuarial sightings.

Actuaries At Battle
One sighting occurred while Haner toured a Civil War battlefield in Spotsylvania, Virginia. He explained it like this:

"I was with Robert Crick, an historian for the National Park Service and Gary Gallagher, a history professor at Penn state. We were walking through the battlefield when Gary remarked that ‘standing behind trees was a better idea from an actuarial perspective than fighting in the open.’ Robert also referred to actuaries within the context of life expectancies on the battlefields."

Actuaries On Ice
While playing hockey on a local adult team, Haner skated onto the ice and noticed the name of the opposing team, "Kwasha Lipton." He asked one opponent if the team members were associated with the actuarial consulting firm of the same name. "Yes," replied the opponent. "Most of us are consultants with the firm." "Actuaries?" Haner asked. "Yes;" the opponent replied. But the team of actuaries lost the game. Haner's team of adults from various walks of life won 9-to-l.

Inventing Actuaries
Edward C. Shoop has been following a story that Sports Writer Frederick C. Klein of the Wall Street Journal occasionally covers. Tbe story is about Andy Brown, a pension actuary in Cincinnati who has invented a tennis racket with a hexagonal-shaped handle. Brown is neither a tennis pro nor an engineer, but a partner in the Cincinnati actuarial firm of Schneider & Brown, and has been trying for about "a dozen years...to peddle an invention that he’s convinced will make playing tennis easier for the multitudes," Klein reported in the January 3, 1997 edition of the WSJ. To date, Brown has been unsuccessful with the invention, but he keeps on trying.