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. 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). 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 "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, a physician/oncologist and a researcher in anthropology. His parents were of Antiochian Greek descent, holding French citizenship. His grandfather, , and his great-grandfather, , were both deputy prime ministers in the 1940s through the 1970s. 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 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 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