A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors.

It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects.

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2008, there were 22,600 jobs classified as statistician in the United States. Of these people, approximately 30 percent worked for governments (federal, state, or local). Additionally, there are substantial numbers of persons who use statistics in their work but have job titles other than statistician. The job of statistician is considered a profession. Most statisticians work in offices and have regular working hours and can therefore be considered white-collar workers. A minority of statisticians are self-employed statistical consultants.^{[citation needed]}

Most employment as a statistician requires a minimum of a masters degree in statistics or a related field. Many professional statisticians have a PhD.

Typical work includes collaborating with scientists, providing mathematical modeling, designing randomized experiements and randomized sampling plans, analyzing experimental or survey results, and forecasting future events (such as sales of a product).

Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.

In 2007, writing under the pseudonym "Poblano," Silver began to publish analyses and predictions related to the 2008 United States presidential election. At first this work appeared on the political blog Daily Kos, but in March 2008 Silver established his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com. By summer of that year, after he revealed his identity to his readers, he began to appear as an electoral and political analyst in national print, online, and cable news media.

The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 0.9%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that year.

Conan Christopher O'Brien (born April 18, 1963) is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer and performer. Since November 2010 he has hosted Conan, a late-night talk show that airs on the American cable television station TBS.

O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and raised in an Irish Catholic family. He served as president of the Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, and was a writer for the sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News. After writing for several comedy shows in Los Angeles, he joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, and later of The Simpsons. He hosted Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 2009, followed by seven months hosting The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, the only person to serve as the permanent host for both NBC programs.

O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston) to Thomas O'Brien, a physician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard, and Ruth O'Brien (née Reardon), an attorney and partner at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray. He is the third of six children. O'Brien's family is Irish Catholic and descends from pre-Civil War era immigrants. In a Late Night episode, O'Brien paid a visit to County Kerry, Ireland, where his ancestors originated.

Todd Daniel Snider (born October 11, 1966 in Portland, Oregon) is an American singer-songwriter with a musical style that combines Americana, alt-country, and folk.

Singer-songwriter Todd Snider was born October 11, 1966, in Portland, Ore., and lived there until his family moved to Houston. When he was 15, he ran away from home with a friend and went back to Portland. After high school, he moved to Santa Rosa, Calif., to be a harmonica player. Then his brother, who lived in Austin, Texas, bought him a ticket to move there. After seeing Jerry Jeff Walker in a local bar, Snider decided that he didn't need a band to be a musician.

After moving to Memphis in the mid-1980s and establishing residency at a club named the Daily Planet, he was discovered by Keith Sykes, a member of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band. A longtime acquaintance of John Prine and Walker, Sykes began to work with Snider to help advance his career. Prine hired him as an assistant and then invited him to open shows. In time, Buffett heard Snider's demo tapes and signed him to his own label. Snider is an opinionated musician whose fans know him to be quite the workhorse. On his music, Snider has said "I was just trying to come up with the best... most open hearted ... well-thought-out lyrics I could come up with. I wanted every song to be sad and funny at the same time, vulnerable and entertaining at the same time, personal and universal at the same time. I wanted every song to be as uniquely written as possible and then I wanted to perform them in a studio loose and rugged and hopefully as uniquely as I could. My hope is to be hard to describe and/or new…I'm not saying I am. I'm just saying that's the hope."