Yes — the same Halley as Halley's Comet. In 1693, the English astronomer published one of the first actuarial life tables in history: an analysis of birth and death records from the city of Breslau, Poland. His paper showed how to calculate the probability of a person of any given age surviving to another age — the mathematical foundation of all life insurance. Halley didn't do this because he cared about insurance; he was trying to understand human mortality. But his work accidentally created an entire industry. The comet is famous. The life table may have been more important.

Famous as the founder of modern nursing — but she was also a pioneering statistician whose methods overlap significantly with actuarial science. After returning from the Crimean War in 1858, she published a landmark statistical report on mortality in the British Army, using charts and data visualisations that had never been used before. She discovered that in peacetime, soldiers died at twice the rate of civilians — from preventable sanitary conditions. She used data to save lives. The actuarial profession cites her as a pioneer. She was the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society.

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century — author of The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle — spent his days working as an insurance executive at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. He handled claims, wrote reports, and performed work that would today be considered actuarial. He is said to have been excellent at his job. He wrote his literature at night. The combination of bureaucratic insurance work and existential literary imagination produced some of the strangest, most influential fiction in the Western canon. "Kafkaesque" became a word. His day job may have been the inspiration.

The world's most famous investor almost became an actuary. In 1951, at age 21, he visited GEICO Insurance Company and met a vice president who showed him the actuarial side of the business. He was so impressed with the predictability of insurance cash flows that he sold everything he owned and bought 350 shares of GEICO. He has since made insurance the backbone of Berkshire Hathaway's empire — famously describing insurance float as "free money." Today Berkshire Hathaway owns GEICO, General Re, and numerous other insurance companies. The world's greatest investor built his fortune on actuarial principles.