Life insurance has undergone enormous change in the last two to three decades. New and innovative products have been developed at the same time as we have seen vast increases in computational power. In addition, the field of finance has experienced a revolution in the development of a mathematical theory of options and financial guarantees, first pioneered in the work of Black, Scholes and Merton, and actuaries have come to realize the importance of that work to risk management in actuarial contexts. Given the changes occurring in the interconnected worlds of finance and life insurance, we believe that this is a good time to recast the mathematics of life contingent risk to be better adapted to the products, science and technology that are relevant to current and future actuaries.