The Poet-Actuary

Poet-Actuary - This sounds like an oxymoron. You imagine a poet as an emo, an individual characterized by great passion, moved by words, in touch with their feelings. Then you think of an actuary as a Maths-nerd, a person of a few words, not the life of the party. You wouldn’t necessarily associate the words poet and actuary. They belong to two different worlds... or do they? Back again in the 80’s, as a schoolboy in a little French country town, I would have to learn the Fables of La Fontaine. Jean de La Fontaine was a story teller who used poetry to tell parables, or fables. He would come up with those unusual stories, such as the Frog and the Rat, starting with the statement: “They to bamboozle are inclined, Saith Merlin, who bamboozled are.” His stories involved random animals teaching humans a life lesson - Thy Shalt Not Bamboozle Thy Neighbour. There was always the “moral of the story”. One of his famous fables was the Tortoise and the Hare, one inspired by the Greek poet A...