Lyrics © Mary McLellan
may sing to the tune of "Oh My Darlin', Clementine"
Independent, independent, independent
When the fact that you are one thing
Does not change the rate
Independent, independent, independent
When the fact that you are one thing
Does not change the rate
Like many of us, Dorian struggles every morning to get out of bed and go to work. But not for the reason you think. Dorian is over 100 years old working at the Magnolia Life Assurance Company. His bosses ask him to find data and information on the life expectancy of everyone in his city. The probability of dying is generally low but Dorian notices an odd spike in deaths recently. Why is that? This story discusses the growth rate of populations as birth and death rates both shrink.
Katie was assigned to research a man who has mysteriously been living since 1894. Instead of doing that, she falls in love with him, not caring that he is way too old for her. She wants him to finally say the three magical words but there’s catch: Rick does not speak. In fact, he hasn’t spoken in sixty years but why not? This short story explores life tables and the expected value of an annuity.
Twelve years ago, Amos’s mother Bonita died in a nursing home. Now, Amos has reached success in his career as an actuary but that comes with a price. A mysterious death in his office leads Amos to pick up where his co-worker left off. Amos discovers a huge secret which caused his co-worker to be killed. Through the use of data analysis and his knowledge of sampling distributions, Amos must figure out why Baby Boomers are suddenly dying and try not to get killed in the process.
In this story from the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2017), a card shark known as "Lady Jane" attempts to swindle a statistician visiting Las Vegas for a conference. The plot twists and turns as the statistician finally turns the tables on Lady Jane because of her knowledge of the Monty Hall Problem and Bayes' Theorem.
This is an oddly funny story about a man who becomes the "focus point of all miracles in the world", a "gigantic fluctuation". He somehow appears to attract extremely improbable, but possible, statistical events (like generating a magnetic field out of the blue, having a woman close to him fly away due to a freak atmospheric phenomenon, etc) and thence considers himself to be a phenomenon of extreme fluctuation in Nature. The story is set as a late evening conversation on a beach between a boy and "The Fluctuation". There is some discussion about probability and coin-tossing along the way. He finally walks away to ensure the boy does not get hurt because of his own improbabilities. The Fluctuation describes the rules of probability that he seems to be violating and, when asked if he is a methematician, replies: "How can I be a mathematician? I'm a fluctuation."'