Person: Taleb, Nassim
Nassim Taleb is a Lebanon-born American mathematician and statistician whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Nagib Taleb had attended a Jesuit school which achieved exceptional results and it certainly did for Nagib since he achieved the highest grade in the Lebanese baccalaureate.
- Taleb attended the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut.
- After he graduated from the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut, Taleb went to Paris for his university studies.
- Great developments took place in the early 1970, before Taleb enrolled, including the opening of Vance Hall to house the Graduate Division, the creation of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Center and the MBA Program for Executives.
- Taleb graduated from the Wharton School with an MBA in 1983.
- In the middle of the 1990s Taleb changed the direction that his career had been taking.
- In 2001 Taleb published Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.
- Some, throwing up their hands after reading Taleb's musings, may say that nothing he offers is helpful because everything is subject to chance and cannot be proven.
- This, hedge fund operator Taleb tells us, is an example of being fooled by randomness.
- While it is important to remember, as Taleb shows in his charming and colourful book, that randomness can fool us, ignoring the most obvious inference from the available evidence can lead to errors as well.
- Taleb was appointed as a Fellow in the Mathematics Finance Program and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University in December 1999 and he continued in this post until December 2005.
- Throughout this time he continued working as a derivatives trader but, after spending 21 years doing this and, after closing 650,000 option transactions and examining 200,000 risk reports, Taleb changed his career in 2006 to become a scholar, mathematical researcher and philosophical essayist.
- In 2007 Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
- Taleb has written three further books: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (2012) and Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018).
- Taleb was a Visiting Research Professor at the London Business School, London from 2007 to 2009, then a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Said Business School BT Center, Oxford University from 2009 to 2013.
Born 12 September 1960, Amioun, Lebanon.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Lebanon
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
