# Nassim Nicholas Taleb Link:: [Wikipedia Entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb) > [!about] According to Wikipedia > Nassim Nicholas Taleb (/ˈtɑːləb/; alternatively Nessim or Nissim; born 1960) is a Lebanese-[[American]] essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist whose work concerns problems of randomness, [[probability]], and uncertainty. The Sunday Times called his 2007 book The Black Swan one of the 12 most influential books since World War II. > > Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 (of which the best-known books are The Black Swan and [[Antifragile - Things that Gain from Disorder]]). 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. 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 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 "[[Antifragile|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. ## Notes