Considering the cachet, the increased importance of data and (numerical) information has lent the mathematically literate over the past few decades, we wondered how the figure of the statistician - and the profession of statistics - are being portrayed in contemporary literature. When we first raised this question, we were surprised to find how difficult it was even to identify works with statisticians as significant characters. While many writers express a fascination with probability, randomness, and chance, they seem to prefer to use hackers, computer scientists, and mathematicians rather than statisticians as characters in their novels and short stories. To understand the reasons behind this phenomenon (and to see just how many works we could come up with that do include statisticians), we undertook an informal survey of statisticians in literature. We thought it fitting to see what literature can tell us about statisticians rather than the other way around.
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