Nassim Nicholas Taleb (; born 12 September 1960) is a Lebanese-American New York University professor, essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, probability, complexity, and uncertainty. Taleb wrote Incerto, a five-volume work on the nature of uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 which includes the notable volumes The Black Swan and Antifragile. He has taught at several universities, serving as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance and is currently an adviser at Universa Investments. The Sunday Times described his 2007 book The Black Swan as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II. Taleb criticized risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from 1987's Black Monday, and later from the 2008 financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. 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, as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.
Early life and family background
Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon, to Minerva Ghosn and Nagib Taleb, an oncologist and a researcher in anthropology. His rich and influential parents were Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christians, and had French citizenship. His maternal grandfather Fouad Nicolas Ghosn and great-grandfather Nicolas Ghosn were both deputy prime ministers of Lebanon in the 1940s through the 1970s, and his four-times great grandfather was one of the board of directors to the administrator of Mount Lebanon. His paternal grandfather Nassim Taleb was a supreme court judge. Taleb attended a French school in Beirut, the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais. His family saw its political prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975. He is a Greek Orthodox Christian.
Education Taleb received Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from the University of Paris. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1983), and a PhD in management science from the University of Paris (Dauphine) (1998), under the direction of Hélyette Geman. His dissertation focused on the mathematics of derivatives pricing.
Career
Finance Taleb has been a practitioner of mathematical finance as a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader. He has held the following positions: managing director and proprietary trader at UBS, currency trader at Credit Suisse First Boston, chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez, managing director and worldwide head of financial option arbitrage at CIBC Wood Gundy, derivatives arbitrage trader at Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank), proprietary trader at BNP Paribas, independent option market maker on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and hedge fund manager for Empirica Capital. Taleb reportedly became financially independent after the crash of 1987 from his hedged short Eurodollar position while working as a trader for First Boston. Next, Taleb pursued work toward his PhD in Paris, completing the degree program in 1998. He returned to New York City and founded Empirica Capital in 1999. During the market downturn in 2000, at the end of the dot com bubble and burst, Empirica's Empirica Kurtosis LLC fund was reported to have made a 56.86% return. Taleb's investing strategies continued to be highly successful during the Nasdaq dive in 2000. Several consecutive years of low market volatility and less spectacular returns followed, and Empirica closed in 2004. In 2007, Taleb joined his former Empirica partner, Mark Spitznagel, as an adviser to Universa Investments, an asset management company based on the "black swan" idea, owned and managed by Spitznagel in Miami, Florida. Taleb attributed the 2008 financial crisis to the mismatch between reality and statistical distributions used in finance. Taleb's investing approach produced significant returns once again, with some Universa funds returning 65% to 115% in October 2008. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, Taleb claimed he retired from trading and would be a full-time author. He describes the nature of his involvement as "totally passive" from 2010 on. The Wall Street Journal journalist Scott Patterson wrote that "Taleb's involvement with Universa made him fabulously wealthy, the cash from the fund far outdistancing the substantial profits from his bestsellers". Taleb considers himself less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness, and says that he used trading to attain independence and freedom from authority. He advocated for tail risk hedging, which is intended to mitigate investors' exposure to extreme market moves. Tail risk hedging safeguards investors by reaping rewards from rare events, thus Taleb's investment management career has included several jackpots followed by lengthy dry spells. At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in 2009, Taleb had harsh words for bankers, suggesting that bankers' recklessness will not be repeated "if you have punishment".
Academia Taleb shifted his career emphasis to mathematical research in 2006. Since 2008, he has taught classes at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, as Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering. and was a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Said Business School BT Center, University of Oxford from 2009 to 2013. Taleb also held positions at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the London Business School. Taleb has been Co-Editor in Chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014, jointly teaches regular courses with Paul Wilmott in London, and occasionally participates in teaching courses toward the Certificate in Quantitative Finance. He is also a faculty member of the New England Complex Systems Institute.
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