Hey everyone,
Exam MLC actually stands for “Actuarial Models: Life Contingencies,” but more on that later. Despite having an increasing workload for the third quarter, I’ve still managed to maintain my study schedule and have even had free time for books. Each night before I go to sleep I usually spend 30 minutes or so reading for fun, and I’ve recently finished Stephen Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which depicts the history of computing from the early days of MIT’s AI Lab and SAIL at Stanford (if you want to go back further to say, Babbage’s Analytical Engine or Ada Lovelace’s programs – you’ll have to look elsewhere) to Wozniak’s Apple II and the formation of Silicon Valley and its mega-corporations up to 1982. The book begins with an introduction to the origins of the term “hacker”, which originated back to the hacks, or pranks that clever students would perform at MIT (well-known hacks include stealing Caltech’s canon, putting firetrucks and police cars on top of the Great Dome, etc.). The term also refers to how early computer enthusiasts would hack together their personal computers from pieces of scrap at the junkyard and throwaway components from large corporations since they didn’t have the luxury to go buy parts from the computer store in the way we can today. I found the book enjoyable and entertaining, but a little lacking because it didn’t present any information past the mid 1980’s before Microsoft’s dominance, since computers have changed dramatically since then.
After reading Hackers, I picked up a copy of Heath’s 1908 translation of Euclid’s Elements – an ancient book on pure Geometry, which I heard about while studying Math in high school but never got around to reading until well after college. The book doesn’t seem difficult – I’d say that the language feels similar to something in between Kafka and Hemingway or that of any typical writer of the early 20th century – without all the messy political allegories or symbolism, though the book is certainly full of symbols! The work itself consists of propositions or theorems derived from fundamental postulates and definitions, and demonstrates methods for drawing geometric configurations using only a compass and straightedge. The logic flows easily, and right now the most difficult thing for me involves suppressing what I already know – because you have to learn how to not take things for granted when proving things from first principals.
Anyway, my main focus for the next three months involves studying for MLC, and one of the challenges you have to face while studying requires memorizing vast amounts of information since even the most obscure topics can serve as legitimate exam material. One of the techniques I’ve seen my actuarial professor, Jim Daniel use involves associating a cryptic formula with a meaningful phrase, for instance if you want to recall the quadratic formula you say, “x equals the opposite of b, plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a,” while singing the tune to “Pop Goes the Weasel” in your head. I’ve seen my medical school friends use this method to great success when memorizing chemical compounds. For some strange reason, people have a much easier time memorizing phrases that carry meaning than memorizing seemingly random strings of numbers and letters. I have no idea how that works but until our nation’s best and brightest minds figure out a way for us to download large books into our minds in a quick and efficient way, I’ll have to stick with these strange, and at times, baffling methods. Anyway, when it came to studying for exams, Dr. Daniel liked to use the phrase “old guys go first” to easily recall formulas for benefit reserves. Today I studied formulas for fractional ages while sitting on a plane en route to Houston from Oakland. These formulas interpolate the distribution of deaths between integer years since the tables themselves only have integral data. For instance, the linear interpolation has the form of (1-t)*s(x)+t*s(x+1), exponential interpolation has the form (1-t)*Log(s(x))+t*Log(s(x+1)), and hyperbolic/Balducci interpolation has the form (1-t)/s(x)+t/s(x+t). Memorizing the shape of each interpolation should not present a problem because the terms linear, exponential, and hyperbolic already give the student hints as to what the symbolic expressions should look like. However, memorizing the exact placement and order of the letters x,t and and symbols +/- will give the student headaches. Thus, I came up with the saying “take from the past and give to the future,” which tells the student to use the multiplicative factor (1-t), with the survival function at time x and use the multiplicative factor t for the survival function at time x+t, a time in the future.
In the midst of studying for exams, I managed to fly over to Oakland this weekend to see one of my friends get married. I’ve known her since I was six as my sister’s godparents’ daughter and both our families would visit each other during vacations and I would play Legos and video games with their son when we weren’t trying to beat each other up. I got to see a lot of people that I haven’t seen in ages and I had a really good time. However, I never thought of marriage as something worth the risk with the 40% divorce rate and all, but once I remember asking my college roommate why he decided to play the lottery and he gave me some ridiculous reason along the lines of “if you don’t play, your odds of winning are zero” despite the fact that he studied math in college (sorry man, just picking on you for a second, you’re a cool guy and all). That did get me thinking though (not enough to start playing the lottery), that you can never reach your goals without taking on risk, and that you have to work hard to achieve anything worthwhile in life. For instance, I study hard despite the 50%-75% failure rate on each exam because I want to succeed as an actuary. Likewise, the newlyweds have decided to take the next step despite knowing that they’ll surely face difficult challenges over the next several decades because they know they’ll be happy if they succeed. For that, I admire their leap of faith and wish them the best.
The pictures of the wedding haven’t arrived yet, so here’s a Double-Double from In-n-Out Burger that I had on the way to the wedding:
