Some Trick

by Helen DeWitt

author’s note: Many years ago a friend commented that we rarely see fiction that shows the way mathematicians think. He talked about the styles of play in poker of a mathematician, an economist and a philosopher. The thing that struck me as especially interesting was the different ways of thinking about probability; I was a great admirer of Edward Tufte’s work on information design, and I thought this might be used in some way to make non-intuitive ways of thinking about probability visible on the page. I began reading obsessively about statistics and probability. Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk was one inspiration; he says: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature.” Analysis of probability seemed more compelling than ever for fiction; I spent endless hours grappling with R, a programming language with strength in statistical graphics. R is open source, and it has come a long way since I first downloaded the DMG. What hasn’t changed, I think, is the gap between people who see why understanding chance matters and people who just don’t get it—people who don’t see why this is crucial to the most basic questions of ethics. I have more glamorous plots in my portfolio than the primitive efforts on display in this story, but the philosophical issue was what I hoped to bri...

There’s a story by John Crowley that uses probability as a stylistic tool. Was it in Engine Summer? Little, Big? I can’t tell you.