Twenty-Five Years Ago in The Actuarial Review
Proustian Ponderings
By Walter C. WrightThe following Random Sampler column, by Charles C. Hewitt Jr., has a title that is too perfect to be passed over for selection in "25 Years Ago."
REMEMBRANCES OF THINGS PAST....
PEOPLE, places, things......and ideasA fair appreciation of another person's interests or values may be obtained by asking her or him to rank the four items above in order of importance. With me "things'' rank a poor fourth, but beyond that I will admit nothing. Suffice it to say that in what follows I would like to treat all of these—but especially people—in an actuarial reverie.
* * * * * * * * At my first ASTIN meeting in Sopot, Poland, in 1969, I struck up a friendship with J. J. van Oosterwijk Bruyn, a delightful gentleman from Holland, who, I later discovered, is a chess player of no mean ability—at least one win over Dr. Max Euwe, I am told. As actuaries will, we challenged one another with assorted puzzles. The following problem particularly delighted him: "In an ancient oriental kingdom lived a monarch who became concerned over the discovery of counterfeit coinage by one (and only one) of the hundred mints in his realm. He desired to identify which mint was responsible, and obtained barrels of freshly minted coins from each of the one hundred mints. The barrels were, of course, labeled by name of mint.
"Turning to his wise men he said, 'I have a scale—not a balance—so calibrated as to measure infinitely fine weights and yet sufficiently large to hold an almost infinite number of coins. I give you two coins—one true (my left hand) and the other false (my right hand). What is the least number of weighings needed to know which is the guilty mint?'"
The wise men got the answer and so did van Oosterwijk Bruyn (pronounced 'fon Oster-vake Brown'). Can you? At the same meeting, as a guest speaker, was the famous Soviet probabilist and mathematician B. Gnedenko—a jolly, approachable type who understood enough English to make conversation possible. Nothing would do for van Oosterwijk Bruyn but that we tell my problem to Gnedenko—who laughed heartily and then explained that a similar problem had been on the Olympiad for Soviet high school math students that same year.
* * * * * * * * One of my favorite CAS members from my earlier years was the late Francis Perryman, who used to doodle in calculus, much to the delight of the staffs of the rating bureaus when he attended committee meetings. Francis also delighted me (and other members) when called upon at a CAS discussion one time. He was introduced by the moderator, "Mr. Perryman will now speak for the stock companies."
Francis's first words, "Mr. Perryman will speak for Mr. Perryman."
* * * * * * * * When I was at AIU (now AIG) there was a flow of foreign students through the New York office—some mathematically minded. Thinking to intrigue one of them, one day I gave him the following old chestnut:
"A hunter walks ten miles south and shoots a bear. He then walks ten miles west and then ten miles north and is back at his starting point. What color was the bear?"
You all know the answer, but my foreign student, after thinking on this puzzle overnight, announced that the geography underlying the supposed solution was not unique. There are, in fact, an infinite number of places in the world where one can travel and return as the imaginary hunter did. So the student proposed-and he is right! Why?
* * * * * * * * One of my favorite CAS members from my later years is Dale Nelson. He can sit quietly and patiently through a committee meeting for several hours, but when Dale finally leans forward to speak, the meeting looks like a commercial for E.F. Hutton.
* * * * * * * * PEOPLE, places, things, and ideas….where do you stand?
