Nassim Nicholas Taleb

His paternal grandfather Nassim Taleb was a supreme court judge and his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Ibrahim Taleb (Nabbout), was a governor of Mount Lebanon in 1866.

Taleb attended a French school there, the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut.

His grandfather,, and his great-grandfather, , were both deputy prime ministers in the 1940s through the 1970s.

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

His family saw its political prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975.

He is a Greek Orthodox Christian.

Taleb received his 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.

According to a profile in Le Monde, Taleb claims to read in ten languages.

Taleb has been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader.

He is a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.

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.

His business model has been to safeguard investors against crises while reaping rewards from rare events, and thus his investment management career has included several jackpots followed by lengthy dry spells.

He has also held the following positions: managing director and proprietary trader at Credit Suisse UBS, worldwide chief proprietary arbitrage derivatives trader for currencies, commodities and non-dollar fixed income at 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 founder of Empirica Capital.

Taleb reportedly became financially independent after the crash of 1987 and was successful during the Nasdaq dive in 2000 as well as the financial crisis that began in 2007, a development he attributed to the mismatch between reality and statistical distributions used in finance.

After that crisis, Taleb became an activist for what he called a "black swan robust society".

Taleb 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 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.

Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon, to Minerva Ghosn and Nagib Taleb, an oncologist and a researcher in anthropology.

His parents were of Antiochian Greek descent, holding French citizenship.

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).

Taleb's five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled Incerto, covers the following books: Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).

Taleb changed careers and became a mathematical researcher and philosophical essayist in 2006, and has held positions at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at University of Massachusetts Amherst, at London Business School, and at Oxford University.

The Sunday Times called his 2007 book The Black Swan one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Since 2007 he has been a Principal/Senior Scientific Adviser at Universa Investments in Miami, Florida, a fund based on the "black swan" idea, owned and managed by former Empirica partner Mark Spitznagel.

In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, Taleb claimed he retired from trading in 2004 and became a full-time author.

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.

Some of its separate funds made returns of 65% to 115% in October 2008.

He has been Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering since 2008.

Taleb attended the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in 2009; at that event he had harsh words for bankers, suggesting that bankers' recklessness will not be repeated "if you have punishment".

He was Distinguished Research Scholar at the Said Business School BT Center, University of Oxford from 2009 to 2013.

He describes the nature of his involvement as "totally passive" from 2010 on.

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.

Taleb is co-Editor in Chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis (since September 2014), jointly teaches regular courses with Paul Wilmott in London (19th time, March 2015), and occasionally participates in teaching courses toward the Certificate in Quantitative Finance.

He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

It was originally published in November 2016 including only the first four books.