Fictional Actuaries - Actuaries in Literature

Actuaries in Literature

• Hunted Down is a short story by Charles Dickens with an actuary, Mr. Meltham of the Inestimable Life Assurance Company, as its hero.
• The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman portrays actuaries as prophets who predict the future, and are organized into various guilds. These Hodgman actuaries have various ethics, such as not predicting the date of one's own death.
• The comic series, Batman, featured a villain named the Actuary: (Detective Comics #683-4 (March–April 1995)): A mathematical genius who applies formulae to aid the Penguin in committing crimes.
• In Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, the main character, Minerva Dobbs, is a thirty-something actuary looking for love.
• Un Certain Monsieur Blot by Pierre Daninos. Mr. Blot is an actuary, who wins a competition as the most average man in France. The book includes the acerbic observation that “there were two kinds of actuaries – those who were still doing actuarial work and those who had found something better to do.”
• The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are part of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld fantasy series and feature Twoflower, the "actuary and world’s first tourist."
• The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov is often considered one of the greatest science fiction works of all time and features "psycho-historians," a sort of hidden priesthood that manipulates politics and economics on a galactic scale to accomplish the goals of peace and prosperity. Part of the theory is that on a planetary scale, people are not predictable but on a galactic scale, the law of large numbers (i.e., the Central Limit Theorem) is valid and therefore, the reactions of the galactic civilization, as a whole, are predictable. Given the characteristics of psycho-historians, they are very much like actuaries.
• Industrial Magic, by Kelley Armstrong, introduces a character called Reuben Aldrich as the head of the actuarial department at a supernatural organisation, and suggests he is also a necromancer.
• The Infinite Shoeblack by Norman MacOwan. The hero (played by Leslie Banks) was a poverty stricken student of the Faculty of Actuaries innocently residing in an Edinburgh brothel.
• Mrs. Warren's Profession - "I shall set up in chambers in the City and work at actuarial calculations and conveyancing.’ So says Vivie, the daughter of the eponymous heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play.
• Preferred Risk, by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey (under the pseudonym Edson McCann), describes a dystopian future dominated by the insurance industry; in Pohl's own words, "the one novel I wrote with Lester del Rey, which was called Preferred Risk, took a year out of my life. It's a terrible book. If you come across it, don't read it."