A Math Nerd Wants to Stop the Big Data Monster
Financial reformer Cathy O’Neil learned the hard way that algorithms can produce terrible consequences.
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The decision to leave her job as a tenure-track math professor at Barnard College and join hedge fund D.E. Shaw in 2007 seemed like a no-brainer. Cathy O’Neil would apply her math skills to the financial markets and make three times the pay. What could go wrong?
Less than a year later, subprime mortgages imploded, the financial crisis set in, and so-called math wizards were targets for blame. “The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all that had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas,” she writes in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown, $26).