NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is a former derivatives trader and mathematical finance practitioner turned essayist and scholar-scientist specializing in problems of uncertainty. His work focuses on practical, mathematical, and philosophical problems with probability, particularly model error. His work on risk covers issues of political stability, convergence of risk measures, statistical mechanics, psychological biases, and risk-based systems of ethics.
Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s School of Engineering. Before starting a career as an essayist and scholar in 2006, Taleb held senior trading positions in derivatives with trading houses in New York and London and managed his own portfolio hedging boutique.
He is the author of Incerto, a Philosophical Essay on Uncertainty (4 volumes: Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, plus a book of aphorisms:The Bed of Procrustes). His technical works include Dynamic Hedging and A Mathematical Parallel Version of the Incerto (in progress, freely available).
He considers himself an Edge Activist—a member of the "literary and empirical community of scientists-philosophers".