Robert J. Myers, an actuary who helped to create the Social Security program and to set America’s official retirement age at 65, died Feb. 13 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 97.

In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Mr. Myers was unexpectedly offered a six-week stint on the Committee on Economic Security, a Roosevelt administration panel that was drawing up blueprints for America’s first comprehensive social insurance programs.

“His name and career are inseparable from the history of Social Security,” said Jeremy Gold, an actuary in New York who is active in the profession’s intense, if esoteric, debates about how to measure the costs of an aging population.

The six-week job turned out to be a career that spanned decades and placed Mr. Myers at the center of America’s great debates about the government’s role in the economy and how to create public safety nets affordably. Actuaries measure risks, and for much of his career Mr. Myers was concerned with the risk that the government might build an old-age program that promised more than it could deliver.   More on an interesting life, here.