Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Arabic: نسيم نيقولا نجيب طالب , alternatively Nessim or Nissim, born 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, 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 a bestselling author, and has been a professor at several universities, currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering and co-editor in chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, a derivatives trader, and is currently a scientific adviser at Universa Investments and the International Monetary Fund. 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 option-like experimentation outperforms directed research.