Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil was interested in math from a young age. After attending UC Berkley as an undergraduate and earning a PhD in mathematics (with a focus on algebraic number theory) from Harvard University in 1999, she held a postdoc appointment at the MIT math department and a professorship at Barnard College. After leaving Barnard to work as a quant (or quantitative analyst) at D.E. Shaw, a major hedge fund, O’Neil found herself at the center of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. In 2011, O’Neil left Shaw to work as a data scientist at an e-commerce startup, but she found herself increasingly disillusioned by how faulty and dangerous algorithms had become central to almost every sector of the economy. O’Neil joined the Occupy Wall Street movement and started a blog, mathbabe, where she focused on “exploring and venting about quantitative issues.” O’Neil is the author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy and the founder of ORCAA (O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing), a consultancy focused on helping companies and organizations responsibly manage and audit algorithms.