Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb[lower-alpha 1] (/ˈtɑːləb/; alternatively Nessim or Nissim; born 12 September 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist[1][2] whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb in 2010
Born	12 September 1960 (1960-09-12) (age 63) Amioun, Lebanon
Nationality	Lebanese and American
Alma mater	University of Paris [clarification needed (see talk)] (BS, MS) Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (MBA) University of Paris (Dauphine) (PhD)
Known for	Applied epistemology, antifragility, black swan theory, ludic fallacy, antilibrary
Awards	Bruno Leoni Award, Wolfram Innovator Award
Scientific career
Fields	Decision theory, risk, probability
Institutions	New York University Tandon School of Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Thesis	The Microstructure of Dynamic Hedging (1998)
Doctoral advisor	Hélyette Geman
Website	fooledbyrandomness.com

Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 (notably, The Black Swan and Antifragile). He has been a professor at several universities, serving as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008.[3][4][5][6][7] He has been co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader, and is currently listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.[8] The Sunday Times called his 2007 book The Black Swan one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.[9]

Taleb criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis.[10][11] He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events.[12] He proposes what he has termed "antifragility" in systems; that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility,[13][14] as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.[15][16]