Dr D C Bowie (President, FASS): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Faculty of Actuaries Students' Society, I am delighted to welcome you all here this evening. As you are probably aware, this lecture forms part of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the actuarial profession in the United Kingdom, and that is something of which we are all very proud.

The Students' Society itself is of course much younger than that, having been established only in 1920, but I suspect that there are a lot of students who cannot envisage a profession without students, without examinations, and it just seems too idyllic a world really to imagine a profession that did not have students doing battle with those examinations. So I am sure that the Students' Society has been around at least as long–certainly in spirit.