if I may be so bold ( and presumptuous my suggestion is of any value) I wondered if your friend would like the risk and structured securities aspects of actuarial catastrophe risk markets. This pretty much has everything in it, from chaos theory to the statistics of the cadence of liabilities upon the different kinds of financial engineering structure that are used to distribute * the liability and fund the most difficult to reinsure policies in the capital markets.

edit : * and package, according to a tremendous variety of fiscal requirements and risk appetites. And naturally covering the most extreme conditions liability payments is historically a fascinating insight into how we developed our world across and binding together such tenuous links.