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. Finance view 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 was a pioneer of tail risk hedging (now sometimes called "black swan protection"), 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". 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. Some of its separate funds made returns of 65% to 115% in October 2008. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, Taleb claimed he retired from trading in 2004 and became a full-time author. He describes the nature of his involvement as "totally passive" from 2010 on. Academic career Taleb changed careers and became a mathematical researcher, scholar 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. He has been Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering