Life Insurance Mathematics

HaIley's Comet has been prominently displayed in many newspapers during the last few months. For the first time in 76 years it appeared this winter, clearly visible against the nocturnal sky. This is an appropriate occasion to point out the fact that Sir Edmund Halley also constructed the world's first life table in 1693, thus creating the scientific foundation of life insurance. Halley's life table and its successors were viewed as deterministic laws, i. e. the number of deaths in any given gro