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Vijay Fafat
- Published on
A short story about a statistician who believes in the second coming of Christ and looks for it in the statistical correlations between the events and people’s reactions to those events (e.g. “14% of college-educated housewives believe in stronger repressive measures against the drug-culture, 51% of working class males above the median salary believe television is a government plot”). Presumably, he’s looking for spikes in certain types of correlations which could signal His arrival.. He gets so obsessed that his marriage suffers (“my wife says, ‘you’re just a cold-hearted statistician who only sees people as numbers and trends’”) along with his professional life (“simple statistical errors, flaws of computation a child would not have made, misplacement of median and mode” and “today I missed an entire distribution curve”).
His obsession leads him to suspect that He might show up as a regular character in his daily life and half-believes the crazed beggar into whom he runs during lunch hour one day might be Jesus. Turns out that the crazed beggar really was a lunatic; the beggar attacks him without reason, putting him out of commission for a few days. After that, the statistician starts leading a normal life but then has a new vision… he sees Christ in the statistical fact that 47% of Dayton, Ohio, does not believe in the teachings of any of the various Churches…
The execution of the story leaves something to be desired; it was a good idea but the author did not develop it the way he could have. There is no attempt to explain the statistician’s thinking on the issue beyond the vague references to “so many bad things happening in the world so Christ is a-coming”. But certainly, math is at the center of it.