Cathy O'Neil

Biography

American mathematician and data scientist with a PhD in mathematics from Harvard. She taught at Barnard College, worked as a quant at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw, and directed the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Disillusioned with financial models after the 2008 crisis, she joined Occupy Wall Street and moved into algorithmic auditing, later founding the audit firm ORCAA. Her 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction introduced the three tests of a weapon of math destruction — opacity, scale and damage — was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction and won the 2019 Euler Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America. She has written regularly for Bloomberg View and blogs at mathbabe.org.