Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
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Born | 1960 (age 56–57) Amioun, Lebanon |
Residence | United States, United Kingdom, and Lebanon |
Nationality | Lebanese (Antiochian Greek Origin) and American |
Fields | Decision theory, risk, probability |
Institutions | New York University Tandon School of Engineering (current May 2015), University of Massachusetts Amherst, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences |
Alma mater |
University of Paris (BS, MS) Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (MBA) University of Paris (Dauphine) (PhD) |
Thesis | The Microstructure of Dynamic Hedging (1998) |
Doctoral advisor | Hélyette Geman |
Known for | Applied epistemology, Antifragility, Black swan theory |
Website fooledbyrandomness |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Arabic: نسيم نقولا طالب, alternatively Nessim or Nissim, born 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.
Taleb is an author, has been a professor at several universities, serving as Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008, and as 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, a derivatives trader and is currently listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.
He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He proposes antifragility in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.