June 4, 2019
Our department has once again been named a Casualty Actuarial Society University Award recipient! From the award notification:
“Your program is receiving this recognition for the exemplary and innovative ways in which it prepares students for a career in the property and casualty insurance industry.”
Click here to read the full notification letter. Congratulations to our Actuarial Science faculty and students for their hard work and dedication. To read the full notification letter, see
May 23, 2019
May 21, 2019
April 21, 2019
April 1, 2019
This year’s Awards Day Ceremony will take place on Friday April 26th at 3:30pm in Schenker Lecture Hall, followed by a talk given by Dr. Steven Miller.
Steven J Miller
Carnegie Mellon and Williams College
During World War II the German army used tanks to devastating advantage. The Allies needed accurate estimates of their tank production and deployment. They used two approaches to find these values: spies, and statistics. In this talk we describe the statistical approach and its generalization. Assuming the tanks are labeled consecutively starting at 1, if we observe $k$ serial numbers from an unknown number $N$ of tanks, with the maximum observed value $m$, what is the best estimate for $N$? This is now known as the German Tank Problem, and is a terrific example of the applicability of mathematics and statistics in the real world. We quickly review some needed combinatorial identities (which is why we are able to obtain clean, closed form expressions), give the proof for the standard problem, discuss the generalization, and show how if we were unable to do the algebra we could guess the formula by an application of linear regression, thus highlighting its power and applicability. Most of the talk only uses basic algebra and elementary knowledge of WWII.
March 27, 2019
March 23, 2019
March 6, 2019
March 5, 2019
February 8, 2019
We are saddened to report that our former colleague Eugene Spiegel passed away earlier this week.
Gene obtained his PhD from MIT in 1965. After a post-doc at Caltech he joined UConn in September 1967 as an Assistant Professor. Gene supervised six doctoral dissertations at UConn and, along with some other colleagues, built up the Mathematics Scholars Program. He served the department and the university for nearly four decades, including as Department Head from 1981 to 1986. He retired in July 2007.
Gene will be missed by family, friends, and all who came to know him.