Cathy O’Neil
Cathy O’Neil is a mathematician, data scientist, writer, and the author of Weapons of Math Destruction. A self-described “math nerd” since childhood, O’Neil took her love of math into the business world when she…
read analysis of Cathy O’Neil
Barack Obama
Barack Obama is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009–2017. Barack Obama’s political legacy, O’Neil shows, is deeply entwined with the era of Big Data. For…
read analysis of Barack Obama
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney is an American politician who was the Republican candidate for president during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Romney made a serious error at a fundraising dinner in Florida when he invoked right-wing talking…
read analysis of Mitt Romney
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton is an American politician who was the Democratic candidate for president during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Clinton’s 2016 campaign relied heavily on the use of political polling data to determine strategy—but as…
read analysis of Hillary Clinton
Sarah Wysocki
Sarah Wysocki is a Washington, D.C.-area teacher whose career was jeopardized in 2007 by an assessment tool called IMPACT, a data-backed approach to weeding out low-performing teachers. Wysocki was fired from her job after receiving…
read analysis of Sarah Wysocki
Get the entire Weapons of Math Destruction LitChart as a printable PDF.
Minor Characters
Kyle Behm
Kyle Behm is a young man who found that personality tests on job applications were keeping him from attaining employment at a large supermarket change. O’Neil asserts that the personality tests’ algorithms were “weapons of math destruction.”
Tim Clifford
Tim Clifford is a middle school English teacher in New York City. He was the victim of value-added modeling that assigned him a low teaching score due to faulty data.
Marc Leder
Marc Leder is a private equity investor who hosted a now-infamous fundraiser for 2012 U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Rayid Ghani
Rayid Ghani is a data scientist who pioneered micro-targeting tools during Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.
