Saturday, April 2, 2011

What am I constantly studying?

Sometimes people ask me what I could be spending so much time studying, after all didn't I already graduate? I came across this sample exam problem that I thought I'd share to give you all some insight to problems actuaries are charged to solve.

For a tyrannosaur with a taste for scientists:

i) The number of scientists eaten has a binomal distribution with parameters q=0.6 and m=8
ii) The number of calories of a scientist is uniformly distributed on (7000, 9000)
iii) The number of calories of scientists eaten are independent, and are independent of the number of scientists eaten

Calculate the probability that two or more scientists are eaten and exactly two of those eaten have at least 8000 calories each.

Apparently actuarial science is just as much about dinosaur dietary habits as it is about financial models and life contingencies.

1 comments:

betty said...

this almost makes me not hate statistics.