This week the topic was exponential growth, and pension investments. We interviewed Simon Perera from Lane, Clark & Peacock about his work as an actuary, what an actuary is and how it involves predicting the growth of investments.
Interesting links:
Puzzle: James has 250 friends on Facebook. He sees a really funny photo and sends it to two of his friends. The next day, each of those friends sends it to two of James’ other friends who haven't seen it yet. If this repeats, how many days will it take (including the first day on which James originally sent the photo) until all of James friends have seen it?
Solution:
It will take 7 days. The number of people doubles each day - so at the end of the first day, only 2 of James’ 250 friends have seen it, on the second day four of his friends have seen it, on the third day 8 friends, on the fourth day 16 friends, and so on until on the 6th day, when the number of friends who have seen it is 128. This means on the seventh day, the remaining 122 friends will also be sent the picture.
This isn’t a hugely realistic model - firstly, websites like Facebook allow you to send things to all your friends at once so it’s not clear why you’d do it two at a time; but also, it’s not necessarily plausible that people will always send it to people who haven’t seen it before, so the way things like this spread in reality isn’t always as fast as this - some people may be counted twice if it’s sent to two random people per day.
Episode 14: Maths and Art
Episode 13: Vectors, matrices and hearing
Episode 12: Regression and traffic management
Episode 11: Programming and boolean algebra
Episode 10: Numbers, infinite and music
Episode 9: Structural engineering and coordinates
Episode 8: Packing Shapes and graphene
Episode 7: Astrophysics and trigonometry
Episode 5: CERN and standard deviation
Episode 4: Nautical Radar and quadratic equations
Episode 3: Cellular automata, graph theory and brains
Episode 2: Statistical sampling in archaeology
Episode 1: Crime Scene Investigation, forensic science and Bayes' theorem
Episode 20: Calculus and fluid dynamics
Episode 19: Computer games and mechanics
Episode 18: Medical imaging and Fourier analysis
Episode 17: Nuclear reactor modelling
Episode 16: Actuarial science and normal distributions
Episode 15: Accountancy and cash management
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