Probability Theory: Key Concepts and Tools for SOA Exam P & CAS Exam 1

This book presents in a very compact way the fundamental aspects of probability theory. It provides the key concepts and tools a student needs to master the Exam P of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and the Exam 1 of the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS).

This text benefits from the vision and experience of the author, who is a professor who has taught probability theory in finance, insurance, and risk management for many years. The author is also a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries.

Students interested in economics, finance, statistics, mathematics, or other fields, will also find this book a useful tool to help them further their studies.

This book can also be warmly recommended as a prerequisite reading to the students who consider taking, or are in the process of taking, the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exams. Indeed, the statistics and portfolio management material studied in the CFA syllabus is fundamentally based on the probability results shown in this book.

This text does not just present the material; it furthers an understanding of the foundations of probability theory. This book does not include exercises because it is designed to be used with the (long) series of exercises made freely available by the Society of Actuaries.

The tables in the appendix link the exercises of the Society of Actuaries with the equations in the book. These tables can be a very convenient tool for providing hints for the exercises that the student cannot solve - instead of going directly to the solutions.

The order in which the contents of this book are presented mostly respects the order of the Society of Actuaries and Casualty Actuarial Society syllabi. Very few adjustments were made to this order and they were done for pedagogical improvement reasons only.

This text is the first one in a series dedicated to actuarial associateship exams. In each of these books, conceptual links between the contents of the various exams are provided. This book was also written in such a way that you can use it throughout your career.

This book is the book the author would have liked to have when he took the Exam P of the Society of Actuaries. It contains all the formulas that are useful to solve the official exercises of the SOA. This book is compact, theoretically solid, and not verbose.

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Olivier Le Courtois is a professor at emlyon business school. His areas of interest are probability and calculus, which he has applied to finance, insurance, and economics. Olivier is an alumnus of Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds a PhD and a Habilitation in Management Science, and an Agrégation in Physics. He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA, QFI track) and he has also obtained the following designations: CFA, CERA, and FRM. Olivier is a former bank engineer and is the founder and ex-director of the CEFRA research center of emlyon business school. He also has more than ten years of consulting experience. Specializing in the modeling of extreme risks in finance and insurance, he is the author of a book published by the Imperial College Press and of several other books, and his research papers have been published in journals such as Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Mathematical Economics, Mathematical Finance, and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. His research contributions have received seven awards, such as the prestigious Kulp-Wright book award of the American Risk and Insurance Association.