I have been asked many times about how my life has embraced the study of physics and mathematics, a business career in the insurance industry and on Wall Street, and, since my retirement, writing and publishing poetry—an unusual mixture it appears at first sight. In threading through those areas of interest, I’ll attempt to explain how all of that came to be for me and how they have interacted through time.
The physics and math part is straightforward. My father studied physics at McGill and earned his doctorate there. He took a position as Assistant Professor at the Collège Militaire Royale in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, later becoming a full professor, head of the physics department, and ultimately dean of science and engineering before accepting the position as Principal of Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. He had a huge influence on my life, developing my curiosity at an early age in how and why things work. I studied physics and mathematics well before they were taught in school. When I was in high school, he suggested science fair projects and guided me through constructing them. One in particular that I remember was passing an electric current from the edge of a beaker of mercury to its center to illustrate the effects of magnetic fields and forces. The mercury swirled in the beaker, its surface forming a cone, high along the walls of the beaker and low at its center. The greater the current, the faster the mercury swirled and the greater the steepness of the cone.
He also cultivated my love for mathematics, teaching me how to bend my mind to think out-of-the-box in trying to derive and prove a result. The story that captivated me, possibly apocryphal, but likely not, is that of the famous German mathematician, Carl Friedrich Gauss, as a 5-year-old in a small schoolhouse. One day all students were held behind for detention, told to take out their slates and chalk and sum the numbers from 1 to 100. All the other students began scratching away while Gauss just sat there and stared into space until the frustrated teacher asked why he wasn’t working on the problem. Gauss claimed that he was and wrote down 5050 on his slate, the correct answer. Asked how he managed to accomplish that in his head, he replied that he thought of writing down the numbers 1 to 100 in a row and then beneath that row another row with the numbers backwards from 100 to 1. Each pair of corresponding numbers, one in the top row and one in the bottom, adds to 101, and there are 100 such pairs. So that sum is 10100. Because each number has been counted twice, it is necessary to divide by 2—hence 5050. That story made quite an impression on me. I tell it often.
In my senior year of high school, I entered a Canada-wide mathematics competition and placed third in the province of Quebec. The top three from each province were invited to a symposium at the University of Windsor in Ontario. There I met Stan Wagon from Montreal, who had placed second. He attended McGill where we took several math classes together. He then earned a doctorate from Dartmouth. He and I reconnected about 50 years later when he read a news item about me in the McGill alumni magazine. He told me about his Problem of the Week (PoW) blog and I began sending in solutions. Working on his problems keeps my mind active and fresh. The most recent PoW he posted demonstrates how accessible they can be: You have three cats and one piece of meat. You slice off a fraction f of that piece and feed it to one of the cats. For a total of n times, you keep slicing off a fraction f of what remains of the piece of meat. Each time you select a cat to feed the slice you’ve just cut off, perhaps the same cat you fed the previous slice to. You are to determine the fraction f, the number n, and the order in which you feed the cats, so that after you’ve administered the n feedings, each cat has been given in total the identical amount of meat. This problem appeared on a Russian Math Olympiad Exam and can be solved without the help of a computer. But Stan and I both love coding computer programs. Each of us constructed a different program to solve the problem.
After graduating from McGill with an Honours B.Sc. and the Anne Molson Gold Medal in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, why did I continue an academic pursuit by attending Harvard for a Ph.D.? Good question, for which there is only the easy and obvious answer: because I couldn’t think of anything else to do at that stage in my life and it seemed natural to follow in my father’s footsteps. As he said at the time: “No matter what you’ll choose to do, any Harvard degree will stand you in good stead.” He was right. Again. Long before graduating, I’d decided that an academic career was not for me. I wanted to earn more money than possible in academe, and frankly, I didn’t like the behind-the-scenes backstabbing I’d already witnessed at Harvard. Admittedly, jockeying for position in a commercial business setting can be open warfare, people wearing their ambitions on their sleeves, but I liked my chances at dealing with that. Still, I faced the question of what business I could qualify for an entry-level position, one that would leverage my math skills. Not surprisingly, my father provided the answer. He knew the chief actuary of a Canadian insurer and set up an interview for me. I was impressed by his palatial office and understood immediately that the trappings of such a top position would appeal to me. Living in the Boston area at the time, I arranged an interview with the co-directors of the actuarial department at the U.S. head office of Sun Life of Canada in nearby Wellesley, Massachusetts.
The interviews with John Douglas and Tim McMurrich went well, but they imposed two conditions before they would employ me. At the time, there was a set of ten actuarial exams, later reduced to nine as I took them, administered twice a year, that had to be passed before one could become certified as an actuary. John and Tim insisted that I pass the first two before they’d hire me. Also, Tim posed a math problem I had to solve, not on the spot, but at home—I could mail him the solution. You are given twelve coins and a pan balance. One of the coins weighs a different amount from the others, but you don’t know which one and whether it’s heavier or lighter. In only three weighings using the pan balance, you must find the counterfeit coin and determine whether it is heavier or lighter than the others. I thought about the problem on the drive home and solved it shortly after arriving there, posting the solution that very day. The actuarial exams were graded on a scale from 1 to 10, with 6 considered a pass. I scored 10 on each of the first two and started work at Sun Life in July 1975. Two and half years later I had passed all nine actuarial exams and became certified as an actuary. Shortly thereafter, I left Sun Life and joined the John Hancock in downtown Boston.
The Hancock had just completed building its wafer-thin skyscraper headquarters near Copley Square. It was known as the Plywood Palace because, so the claim goes, the turbulent winds it created were able to suck out its large windows that would then fall to the street below and shatter into myriad glass pellets that the wind would sweep along the street. A dangerous time to be there. The fallen windows were immediately replaced with plywood. The architect, the famous I.M. Pei, claimed no responsibility for the mess. My job at the Hancock was in the department that negotiated contracts for their life insurance agents, one group of which was unionized with collective bargaining sessions in Washington, D.C. every three years. I was a member of the company team at one of those sessions. I remember constructing a 3-dimensional pyramid out of plywood (a nod to the palace) to illustrate management’s proposal to pay bonuses to the agents as a function of the volume of their insurance policy sales and how long the policies they sold stayed on the books. Two adjacent sides of the pyramid represented those two variables and the height of the pyramid measured the size of bonus that would be payable. Agents would be incentivized to climb the steps to the top. That model was more easily understood by the agents’ negotiating team than any written description or formula would have been. It was a hit. The union accepted the proposal.
While at the Hancock, I became intrigued by the investment side of the house. Life insurance companies invest the insurance premiums they collect in various instruments, mostly bonds. Because interest rates are generally higher the longer the maturity of a bond, it was not surprising to find the average maturity of the Hancock’s bond portfolio well in excess of 10 years. At the end of the 1970s, there was runaway inflation in the United States. Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates aggressively to combat the inflation. I realized that life insurers’ practice of investing in long bonds would bankrupt the industry if those bonds had to be valued at market prices instead of the so-called “book prices” at which the bonds were originally purchased. Why? Because consumers, the holders of life insurance policies, could surrender their policies without penalty, withdraw the cash value, and then invest that amount to earn much higher interest rates elsewhere. If sufficiently many policyholders acted on this compelling opportunity, insurers would have to liquidate a large part of their bond portfolios at a huge loss. From this observation came two important ideas: to control risk, the importance of matching assets and liabilities; and to attract new customers, designing new insurance policies to credit current interest rates. I wrote and published several research papers on these topics and soon became known throughout the actuarial profession as a pioneer in the nascent field of asset-liability management. That led to my next job—at Equitable Life Assurance Society, now Axa, a move from Boston to New York City.
At Equitable, although still on the actuarial side of the house, I worked closely with Robert Platt, head of bond investments, a natural liaison because I was employed in the pension products division and those products are all about the underlying investments. I continued to write and publish papers on asset-liability management and new product development, several of which were awarded prizes. I was invited to present my work at several international actuarial congresses of actuaries, leading me to spend time in Europe and Australia.
My stint at Equitable lasted three years. I followed Bob Platt to Morgan Stanley. He had been recruited to build a Fixed Income Research practice there and hired me to lead a group to write research papers for the firm’s pension-fund and insurance-company clients. When Bob retired, I was named head of Fixed Income Research and several years later Chief Information Officer (CIO) responsible for all technology on the institutional side of the firm, my counterpart on the retail side having come from Dean Witter with whom Morgan Stanley had merged.
Running the technology division was a new experience for me, one for which I had little relevant expertise. My job as manager of several thousand employees was to assure that the firm’s technology was up and running 24/7 all year long to keep sales people, traders, and investment bankers content. That meant helping the people who worked for me get what they needed to solve their problems, and weeding out non-performers and promoting the performers. Historically, women in the technology division had been overlooked for promotion. Over the course of my tenure as CIO, I remedied that. One incident in particular is worth highlighting.
A senior tech guy from our London office, who shall remain nameless, took pains to schedule an appointment with me while he visited the New York office. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he made it clear why he wanted to see me. “I hear that you’re thinking of appointing Moira Kilcoyne the head of technology for Europe,” he said. I responded, “I don’t make it a practice of commenting on rumors or speculation. Why are you asking?” “Because that would be unacceptable to me and a number of my colleagues,” he said. “Well, your colleagues aren’t here with you, so I’ll assume you’re speaking for yourself. I guess I’ll have to make an exception to my policy. It appears you want to offer your resignation…” He nearly fell off his chair and began to backpedal as fast as he could. I continued: “Let me just say that I’ll announce it later today.” He was puzzled by my ambiguity—announce his resignation or the naming of the new European CIO. As I had informed senior management at the firm, Moira turned out to be a successful European CIO, and she and another person ultimately became co-CIOs for the entire technology operation. Managing Director is the highest non-executive title that Morgan Stanley bestows. When I first became CIO, there were no women Managing Directors in the technology division. I promoted Moira and several more during my tenure.
A key advantage in working for a Wall Street firm is the compensation. The base salaries are good, but in most years the yearend bonuses are multiples of the base salaries. It’s easily possible to accumulate a nest egg sufficient to retire comfortably as early as one’s fifties. I retired at age 50, but the firm kept me on as an advisor until I reached age 55, at which point my retirement health plan was guaranteed. Why did I retire if the going was so good? Because the work is hard—long hours and running a global operation, the CIO is effectively on call 24/7. Because I had already made enough money, and, unlike many in that business, making money was never my sole goal. It happened that I had earned enough not only for myself and my children, but also for me to yield a significant share to my wife when we divorced. But why retire at all if you enjoy the people you’re working with and also the work? A question I kept asking myself. The answer: because, at some point, I just got too tired to keep going at that pace and I realized that someone younger could do the job better than I could.
The challenge for me, as it is for many people when they retire, was how to fill time in a fulfilling way. Here’s where in my story I’ll backtrack briefly to high school. In my senior year, I was co-editor of the school’s annual literary magazine called “Signature.” I attended a small public English school in a much larger French community—our graduating class had fewer than 25 students, and the classes behind me about the same. There were not many writers among that crowd. So we, as editors of the magazine, had to include some of our own work to fill it out. While I’ve always felt I’m more proficient with numbers than words, I did enjoy writing and had accumulated several pieces to include, among which a short story titled “Today the Rain, Tomorrow the Sun,” admittedly not a snazzy title, but a piece that had won the school’s top fiction award even though it had been entered as nonfiction. It was about a canoe trip gone bad, very bad, canoes overturning in rapids, several of us barely making it to shore, packs lost.
More about canoe trips later, but first another of my father’s gifts. He reveled in being outdoors, especially hiking in the mountains. We lived in Quebec near the Eastern Townships and there were many mountains to climb. Dad purchased from the federal government several 1:50,000-scale topographical maps that allowed us to navigate through woods to avoid the steepest routes to the peaks. His goal was to arrive at an unnamed pond appearing on one of those maps, and forever thereafter call it his own. Those excursions, which lasted from early morning until dusk, imbued me with a love of the outdoors that I’ve cultured ever since. During my teenage years, I attended summer camp in the Laurentian mountains. Camp Nominingue was such a home for me that I applied for next summer’s stay as soon as I returned from this summer’s. There were many highlights of the camp experience, but none more profound or enduring than canoe trips. For 9-year-olds, they only lasted overnight, but expanded to 3 days then 5 days away from camp as we grew older. As a senior camper at age 15, we embarked on 7-10 day trips. The bad experience mentioned earlier occurred on one of those. When I later became a veteran counselor at the camp, I asked to repeat that particular trip as its leader in order to locate and blaze the key trail that we’d missed when I was a camper, allowing others after us to progress from the drop off at Lac Rouge to the destination at Lac de la Maison de Pierre without having to resort to challenging the turbulent rapids in the Rivière Rouge and failing as we had years before. After spending several days clearing and blazing the trail from Lac Rouge to the next lake in the chain of lakes along the route, we reached the far end of Maison de Pierre in time for the scheduled pickup at the end of the trip. Success all around.
Since my retirement, I’ve devoted myself to three activities: walking between ten and twenty thousand steps a day, continuing to solve Stan’s PoWs, and writing poetry. Not just any walking, but primarily in the woods along marked trails, as far away from people as possible to avoid distractions as I let my mind wander. Because I’m not a lover of unleashed dogs, as far away from them as possible, too. As to writing poetry, that followed naturally from my high school experience in creative writing. True that I had written many research papers as an actuary and while in Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley, but all were cast in passive voice. They were intended to be learned expositions, and while often creative in exposing novel concepts, they certainly did not qualify as creative writing the way an MFA knows it. Plain and simple, I lacked the credentials in creative writing to be confident that I could craft effective poems. Early on, my new wife, Deborah Schneider, who also is my literary agent, encouraged me to participate in writing workshops as the best way to build expertise. Those workshops also served another purpose—I quickly learned to develop a thicker skin in the face of sometimes withering (but supposedly constructive) critique. Overall, among the annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival and the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, I participated in some thirty weeks’ worth of peer review, mostly in poetry, but six times in fiction at Bread Loaf. Some people have told me that my cumulative experience at those workshops is equivalent to having earned an MFA. I doubt that. Anyhow, as important as learning how to write powerful poems, I gained a number of colleagues with whom I was able to share new work for critique and react to theirs in return.
What is it about poetry and mathematics and physics and the outdoors that seem to coalesce for me? Certainly the fields of math and physics provide material for a poem. Especially so for my hours outdoors as well. For me, observing plants and animals often seeds a poem that ultimately finds its way into the current world situation. The creative thinking that succeeds in math and physics is quite similar to that needed to write a poem. Fundamentally, it’s about interrelationships, connections, correlations, correspondences. The logic in math is that A implies B implies C, thus creating a connection between A and C. The same effect occurs in poetry. A piece starts somewhere, then pivots someplace else, perhaps repeating that yet again, and either returns to the beginning or lands far away. This is best illustrated by example. Consider my poem, “Parhelion,” published in The Montreal Review. The phenomenon of the rainbow called a parhelion derives from the physics of optics. It takes place in the outdoors, in the case of that poem during a walk along Red River Beach on Cape Cod. Near sunset, where the necessary 22 degrees of slant can readily occur. In my poetry book, “When Godot Arrived,” that will be published in 2026, I have chosen to rename the poem from “Parhelion” to “The Sun God’s Sun Dog,” a catchier title. The A to B to C connections for the poem are pretty evident: a parhelion is also known as a sun dog, the word dog when reversed turns into god, and the particular circumstance of the poem led me to think of Egyptian mythology with the gods Aten and Ra, yet the person with whom the narrator of the poem is talking says dog, not god, and I decided that the Greek god Zeus was more appropriate to the poem because he did indeed have a dog. I snuck a comment into the poem, an aside, about my dislike of unleashed dogs. The poem ends with the birth of a sun dog. The poem with its 14 lines is in the form of a free-verse sonnet.
The Sun God’s Sun Dog
When he said its name, the more common
one, I thought of Aten or Ra, mythology
learned long ago, but no, he said, not god,
but dog, so I dispatched Zeus walking his,
and suppressed my overall dislike of dogs
unleashed on the paths I walk, those signs
denying their rights the owners claim,
but not that type of dog, he said, instead
the kind revealed to him when he and his
mother marveled at the sky one evening,
happenstance she said, clouds found 22°
aslant from the setting sun, a bright spot
in his day, rainbow colored, as if another
sun had suddenly been born, the sundog.
For many poems, there is a logical turn from one principal image or idea to another. Manufacturing a smooth link is helpful, but not necessary. Personally, I prefer a link that is not a great leap that might lose the reader. I want the transition to come across as sensible, even if unusual, because I am a mathematician at heart.
To see how philosophy can enter a poem that begins somewhere entirely different, let us examine the poem “The Importance Of Halfway,” also appearing in The Montreal Review. The poem uses the device of expressing personal thoughts in a more general manner in order to draw in readers for whom those sentiments also resonate. Probably easiest to see if I reproduce the poem here.
The Importance Of Halfway
Used to be the inn between two towns,
the place to rest when the journey was long,
and now it’s a house for a stay before
returning to normal life. When a journey
seems too long to complete, we break it into
segments, halfway becoming the goal
to render the rest feasible, a psychology
to trick ourselves into thinking that the whole
is achievable. Still, the rest is also a trek,
its halfway point becoming the next marker,
and so on, each remaining part only
half the last. We never make it to the end,
so the mathematical conundrum goes,
the fallacy in logic that each portion takes
the same time. As parents, we keep
telling our children they are halfway there,
wherever there might actually be
in that moment. For us, if that spot is where
we feel adjusted to our life situation,
the end state may not be obvious or desirable,
the ultimate target elusive, uncertainty
all but certain. Of one thing we can be sure—
at some point, we will find ourselves
halfway to our demise, just never know when.
The piece commences innocuously enough by noting that in the past when people journeyed between towns by foot or horse or horse and carriage, there was often an inn halfway. These days, a halfway house is a place for people who are recovering from incarceration or substance abuse to gain as smooth a re-entry as possible back into society. The poem then expands the notion of journey to include any large personal effort, such as the effort a student undertakes to matriculate from college. The task is broken into halves, success recognized when a half is completed, thus rendering all that remains to be done seemingly more feasible. The poem then pauses briefly to catch its breath at Xeno’s famous paradox that I’ll express here not in terms of Achilles chasing a tortoise, but you, the reader, standing one yard from a wall and moving toward it by halves. The geometric sequence is ½, ¼, … Because it only reaches zero after an infinite number of steps, it might appear that you never reach the wall. But if you’re moving at constant speed, however fast or slow, traversing each successive segment takes precisely half the time for the preceding segment. The sum of the infinite series ½ + ¼ + … is exactly 1 and you do get to the wall in finite time. Following this mild digression, the poem resumes its journey, taking on more meaningful tasks. It pivots to the job of parenting and how we naturally encourage our children to persevere when they want to surrender. From there, I leap to the personal, the matter of one’s own life situation, perhaps one of not even knowing the desired goals, uncertainty all but certain. The topic of death is unavoidable in many poems, whether it be a death that has already occurred or one that is imminent or one that may still be a ways off, nevertheless has entered the thinking and become hard to shake. You might reasonably have guessed that this range of material could not be dealt with in a poem of only 24 lines, but you’d have been wrong.
I would like to end this discourse by showing how the current political situation in the United States and its intrusion into Canada can make its way into a poem in a manner acceptable to poetry editors who generally shy away from politics in the poems they are willing to publish. My poem “Manifest Destiny” recently appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal. It is formal poetry in the sense that it is composed of rhyming couplets. Most of what I write is free verse, not bound by the strictures of rhyme, meter, or particular forms such as the villanelle, pantoum, or sestina. However, every now and then, I feel an urge to compose a piece in one of those forms, or more simply, a piece that only rhymes. This is one of the latter. It is particularly relevant to Canadians. I was born in Montreal but now reside in the United States. As you might surmise, this piece speaks to me especially keenly.
Manifest Destiny
It is alive and well,
thriving south of the 49th parallel,
merely a straight line drawn with a rule,
so claims the master whose ridicule
is divinely inspired. But sir, a solemn treaty,
not some marker-scrawled graffiti—
it’s formally concluded, a ratified
agreement between countries, solidified
by longstanding practice,
until broken, then renegotiated with malice,
thus practically without standing,
the two parties soon landing
at the doorstep of war. Whether trade
or sovereignty, the matter will never be laid
to rest until ripped to shreds
by one or other heads
of state, with or without support
of fellow politicians and against retort
from opposition forces. Instead, laid to waste
in knee-jerk haste,
one party fair game to be maligned,
says he—only its predecessor signed.
And so a man who’s lost his mind
thinks of rubbing out the boundary line
with a wave of his imagined wand
to annex everything that lies beyond.
This poem does not exhibit anything significant along the logic lines of A to B to C. Instead, it uses short lines to force anticipation of the next rhyme in a couplet, thus holding the reader’s attention. The term “manifest destiny” was coined by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845 to frame the political philosophy underpinning the plan to annex Texas and Oregon. James Polk supported this plan during his term as president of the United States. The current president seems to have signed on with respect to Canada and Greenland.
How to end an essay? Often as difficult a choice as how to end a poem. The fallback is death. At age 75, I am now much more than halfway to my demise. During my life, I have been fortunate to witness sundogs and other celestial phenomena. I feel that my life has been fulfilling. Apart from the huge role my family plays in that, a large part is dedication to my hobby of writing poetry. I often claim that I’m not a professional poet, but my poetry colleagues generously dispute that. They point to the four full-length collections that I’ve already published and a fifth soon to be released. Hobby or not, poetry continues to absorb me every day. As do mathematics and walks in the woods. I intend to continue those pursuits as long as I’m able. The Adirondacks at Saranac Lake in New York State have been my favorite getaway and the source of many of my poems. Perhaps it will be the place I expire. 
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Jim Tilley has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Billy Collins selected his poem, On the Art of Patience, to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024.
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