From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A page of actuary math
Actuaries
are people who are experts in
mathematics
,
probability
,
economics
, and
finance
who figure out how much
money
businesses
should charge for making
promises
to pay for something that may or may not happen.
[1]
Hundreds of years ago, when people got sick or died, it cost a lot of
money
to take care of them or
bury
them. People had the idea of joining their money together to help each other out. This was called
pooling
. Eventually, people started to make a
business
out of collecting enough money to help people who had big problems.
[2]
Figuring out how much money needed to be collected from people to be used if problems happened was not easy. Over hundreds of years, the math needed for this was developed by many people from all over the world.
[2]
Today, actuaries use
computers
to figure out problems that were too difficult before.
[3]
Actuaries now work in many places. Most work for
insurance
companies
, but others work in all kinds of
finance
companies
.
[4]
Actuaries still figure out how much money needs to be paid for life insurance, as well as other kinds of money promises, like
pensions
,
car
insurance,
[5]
house
insurance, and similar.
[4]
Actuaries also work with companies to figure out if making certain business deals are a good idea, since actuaries work with figuring out what the
probabilities
are of different business situations happening.
[4]
People who want to be actuaries need to take many
tests
. The tests are not the same in different parts of the world.