I NEVER considered that I might obtain a patent one day. To me, patents were mostly for engineers, not for actuaries like me.

At Towers Watson, I advise insurance companies on risks associated with their businesses. I’m also a mathematics professor in residence at the University of Connecticut. I oversee several graduate students at an actuarial research center there and am always looking for real-world examples for them to work on.

A few years ago, I started thinking about statistical sampling in the insurance industry as something for students to test. I threw out some ideas to them that were based on concepts in consumer polling. We started with simple calculations and moved on to more involved ones. To me, the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.

Generally when an insurer performs certain calculations, it includes data from all its policies. If it has a million policies, that means a lot of processing as various scenarios are considered. Sometimes, the work can take days.