Highlights

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, randomness, human error, probability, and the philosophy of knowledge. He transformed his interests into three successful careers—as a man of letters, a businessman-trader-risk manager, and a university professor.

Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and Principal of Universa Investments LP.

His books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in 31 languages with more than 3 million copies in print. The Black Swan idea is currently inspiring research papers in philosophy, statistics, psychology, economics, medical research, epidemiology, political science, and engineering.

• Taleb specializes in uncertainty and errors in human knowledge, teaching us how to deal with unpredictability.
• He is one of the few people who can both walk the walk and talk the talk. He both predicted the economic crisis and made a personal fortune out of it.
• He specializes in making a living out of human’s misunderstanding of uncertainty.
• A polymath, he taught in fields so far apart as the psychology of uncertainty and human error, and the mathematics of finance.