» Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics

Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excelent Handbook
Comment: This is an excelent handbook for any who seek an introduction of the Actuarial Math's.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to the topic
Comment: Before buying this book I had never had any exposure to actuarial mathematics. I was looking for a good introduction that would fit my mathematical skills (PhD Economist feeling comfortable with applied mathematics but lacking the training in mathematical to do proofs or anything similar). Promislow's book fully met my expectations and increased my interest for the subject. In fact I have purchased more books since.

It is true that the title is a little misleading as the book's primary topic is life insurance. However, there are three or four chapter dealing with risk theory providing a good introduction. What I found best in this book are the numerous exercises with answers in the back of the book. This allowed me to test my understanding of the subject and also what is important in each chapter. In some chapters it is not straightforward to see where the author is heading, however, the exercises compensated very well for this.

All in all I can warmly recommend this book to anyone who has a good background in mathematical economics at the level of Varian (Microeconomic Analysis) and who wants to get a good introduction into the topic.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An adequate book for beginners.
Comment: The problem with Life Insurance mathematics is that there are very few really good books on the topic. This book does little to alleviate this situation. Inspite of its title, "Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics" is essential a text book on Life Insurance mathematics. Of its 372 pages, 243 are devoted to Life Insurance mathematics (the remaining pages focussing on risk theory, in particular compound distributions, Markov chains, Poisson processes and ruin models, all of which are usually considered in the context of property and casualty or general insurance).

The explanations in the book are easy to understand and a reasonable number of worked examples and exercises are provided (with answers to the exercises given at the end of the book). However, at the same time, the explanations lack depth and the text book stops short of covering many of the more advanced topics in Actuarial Mathematics (such as increasing insurance policies and bonuses).

This is an adequate book for beginners and would be appropriate as a first text in Actuarial Mathematics. However, more advanced students are likely to find this book to be lacking.

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