Cathy O'Neil

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Cathy O'Neil at the launch of her book on Google Cambridge 2016

Catherine "Cathy" Helen O'Neil (* 1972 ) is an American mathematician and critic of the financial industry.

Life

O'Neil began her studies in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley (bachelor's degree), which she completed with her doctorate in 1999 with Barry Mazur at Harvard University in Cambridge , Massachusetts . The dissertation Jacobians of curves of genus one deals with a topic from arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then conducted research at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and at Barnard College in New York City , where she became an assistant professor.

In 2007 she worked for two years in finance as a quant and analyst for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. in New York City. She then worked at RiskMetrics, a software company that calculates the risks of hedge fund investments, before joining the start-up Intent Media as lead data scientist . After that, she turned away from the financial industry, disaffected. She became part of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its "Alternative Banking Group" (development of alternative banking systems). O'Neil has been a writer since 2011. She led the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism at the Tow Center and was a data science consultant at Johnson Research Labs.

O'Neil's 2016 book “Weapons of Math Destruction” was long listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction that year. In it she goes into the dangers of big data in general and quantitative models in particular for society. For 2019 she was awarded the Euler Book Prize .

Cathy O'Neil is with the mathematician Aise Johan de Jong from the Columbia University married and has three sons.

Fonts

  • with Rachel Schutt: Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline . O'Reilly 2013, ISBN 978-1-4493-5865-5 .
  • On Being a Data Skeptic . O'Reilly Media 2013. (e-book)
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy . Crown, New York City 2016, ISBN 978-0-553-41881-1 .
    • German: attack of the algorithms. How they manipulate elections, destroy job opportunities and endanger our health. Hanser, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-446-25668-2 .

Web links

Commons : Cathy O'Neil  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hanser Verlag: Cathy O'Neil. Retrieved August 22, 2017 .
  2. Cathy O'Neil in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  3. Speaker: Cathy O'Neil: Strata Conference + Hadoop World - O'Reilly Conferences, October 23-25, 2012, New York, NY. Retrieved March 22, 2017 .
  4. What's next for mathbabe? In: mathbabe. September 12, 2014, accessed March 22, 2017 .