Cathy O’Neil, author of “Weapons of Math Destruction,” stopped by the studio while in town for the Wisconsin Book Festival.
Cathy O’Neil is author of the blog MathBabe. Previously she 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 then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She hopes to someday have a better answer to the question, “what can a non-academic mathematician do that makes the world a better place?”
