Have there been actuaries who have written "revolutionary" papers that have lead to international recognition, like winning the Nobel Prize but an actuarial equivalent. On a separate topic, is the field of actuarial science quite mature in that the fundamental questions and problems and understanding of the field at such an advanced stage that there is little scope for innovation or further discovery.
Closest thing would be David X. Li. He's a qualified actuary and popularised the use of Gaussian copulas for pricing collateralised debt obligations. This allowed CDOs to be priced a lot faster and easier than ever before. The market grew rapidly, "sales of CDOs grew—from $69 billion in 2000 to around $500 billion in 2006". If it hadn't led to a global economic crash it's likely he might have been up for some kind of award.
At the end of the 19th century some physicists felt there was nothing new to discover in physics, so who knows!
Are there any famous (relatively speaking) "open problems" in actuarial science? Such as what Fermat's Last Theorem was to Mathematics?
Break-through is to breakthrough Actuarial Science and compete outside with other professionals. You can even see Xi.Li was doing that. The more conventions with only Actuaries present, there will never be a breakthrough.
The basic problem with this type of question is that professions are so conservative they spend all their time protecting their privileges and creating reserved roles. Anyone making advances is likely to be a threat to sections of the profession and hence be quietly forced out. The actuarial profession didn't even see the 2008 crisis coming and that sort of thing is well within their remit. How is such as profession likely produce something original? The only competent central banker of the last 50 years Paul Volker said that the only financial innovation he had seen in his lifetime was the atm machine. Innovation in finance pretty much always means financial disaster at some point.
There are also some other notable actuarial guys in this link besides David X.Li https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
