It is a great honour for an accountant to be invited to deliver the Students' Society 1984 Jubilee Lecture. When the Financial Times defined an actuary as “someone who found accountancy too exciting”, I realized that accountancy might be a suitable subject for this Jubilee Lecture.

I note that the Institute of Accountants and Actuaries in Glasgow played a pioneering role in the evolution of the accountancy profession in Scotland during the latter half of the last century.

So the paths of the actuarial and accountancy professions have met, and indeed crossed, on a number of issues, and we have a great deal in common, most of all perhaps a belief in the power of presenting an argument through numbers. Like you, we have members in practice and in commercial employment, we form professional opinions which we express in reports and we are concerned with problems of measurement; also we each have our own procedures, assumptions, jargon and rules, all of which are confusing to the uninitiated.