“Veritas quaeritur, non possidetur.” — Truth is sought, not possessed.

I am a professor at York University in Toronto, and have spent most of my professional life in academia, though I have never been entirely comfortable staying within its walls. My day job involves teaching financial literacy, while my outside work has taken me into the “real world” of pensions, investments and retirement planning. Over the past 30 years, I have delivered more than 2,000 seminars and lectures.

My research interests have never respected disciplinary boundaries. I have published on actuarial models of human longevity; mathematical models of tontines; excavated the financial logic of Babylonian annuities; and studied how people priced longevity-contingent claims in the seventeenth century. More recently, I have wandered farther afield into intellectual history and am currently working on a “chronology” project about the late Renaissance — when theologians, classicists, and assorted troublemakers argued about something we now take for granted: exactly when the past happened.

This website is a repository for some of the things I have written, published, calculated, excavated, and occasionally changed my mind about. It includes links to books and research, as well as a blog that I update from time to time.