Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist who earned a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University. She authored this book with the goal of making people aware of the impact WMDs have on the course of American lives. She started out as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund called D.E. Shaw, where she worked as part of a 10-person crew known as the “futures group” (33).

The financial crisis’ fallout from 2008-2009 disenchanted O’Neil as she saw these hedge funds profit while millions of Americans suffered. She left D.E. Shaw in 2009 to join RiskMetrics Group, where she analyzed risk in the hopes of fixing financial WMDs. By 2011, O’Neil had come to see her role as somewhat arbitrary and decided to transition to a career with Intent Media, a startup company based in New York. There, she designed an algorithm that predicted which customers would actually follow through on purchases. In this role, she saw a lot of commonalities between Big Data and finance that lead her to a new understanding of how wealth was achieved and how people were being affected by the money-producing models they used.