Economics Professor Abigail Hornstein writes in:
Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University, was a post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, and was a professor at Barnard College, where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and next for RiskMetrics, a software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene; she then launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. O’Neil is a weekly guest on the Slate Money podcast. She co-wrote the book Doing Data Science (2013) and is the author of a new book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Random House, September 2016), about the dark side of big data.
Please contact the organizers with any questions: David Constantine (math), Abigail Hornstein (economics), and Chris Rasmussen (math)
Date: Thursday, April 21
Time: 8-9 PM
Place: Ring Family Performing Arts Hall (CFA)
