At the Annual General Meeting of the Students' Society in 1961, a motion was passed that articles of a less serious nature than those normally published in the past be accepted by the Editors of J.S.S. It is in the spirit of this motion that this article is offered. It does not pretend to advance actuarial science in any way, and its only purpose is to introduce members of the profession to a technique which is interesting in that it is different from our normal techniques and to show that it has possibilities in the actuarial field by demonstrating its applications in other fields.

This is not the first time that the subject has been written about in an actuarial journal. Edmund C. Berkeley (1937) wrote a paper for the American Institute of Actuaries going into the subject in some detail, and it is from this paper that I have taken my examples of applications to life office practice.