Catherine ("Cathy") Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.[1]
Education and career
O'Neil attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate,[1] received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1999,[2][3] and afterward held positions in the mathematics departments of MIT and Barnard College,.[4] She left academia in 2007, and worked for four years in the finance industry.[5] She worked as an analyst at D. E. Shaw & Co.[6] After becoming disenchanted with the world of finance, O'Neil became involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement,[7][1] participating in its Alternative Banking Group.[8]
O'Neil operates the blog mathbabe.org and is a contributor to Bloomberg View.[9][10][11]
Her first book, Doing Data Science, was written with Rachel Schutt and published in 2013.[10] In 2016, her second book, Weapons of Math Destruction was published, long-listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction[12][13] and became a New York Times best-seller.[4] A third book, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, was published March 2022.
She is the founder of O'Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing (ORCAA), an algorithmic auditing company.[3][14]
