For all the mathematician-profile fans, time for another Math-Frolic-generated portrait!
After 3 male and one female Sunday “profiles,” perhaps time to focus on another female. Thus, today's drum-r-r-r-r-r-roll for…. Cathy O’Neil.
Cathy’s not just a mathematician though, she’s an observer/commentator/ranter of first order on all worldly things. Hopefully, she needs little introduction for most of you, but still we’ll start at the beginning.
Cathy was born on July 13th sometime in the 20th century (I couldn’t find the actual year… females are so good at hiding such details). That makes her a Cancer, or in her case really more of a Can-do person! She told a few more details of her early math life back when I interviewed her in 2014 (like how she decided in the summer of her 15th year to become a math professor instead of a pianist):
Now she is 5 years richer, famous-er, and well-travelled (her ultimate pro-guide to travel, by the way, is HERE)!
Her adult-like life began with attendance at Berkeley perhaps in the early 90s… and perhaps accounting for her leftward leanings (…or maybe she attended Maoist summer boot camps, the records for which have been expunged). She followed Berkeley up with a PhD. from Harvard in 1999, where her advisor was Barry Mazur, no slouch of a mathematician himself. She taught for awhile but left academia in 2007 to go work as a quant in the private finance industry (raising the question of why do kids growing up wanna be policemen, and firemen, and doctors, but never "quants"?). Anyway, she was there just in time to witness George Bush & Friends nearly bring down the entire world economy in 2008/9 without even trying (before the Government figured out creative ways to milk the middle-class for more funds with which to pay off all the failed bankers, industries, and their poor broke CEOs… and, plant the seeds for it to happen all over again… hey, maybe even this year!). That experience lessened Cathy's affections for private finance and she abandoned it before necessitating the quintuple-hernia-bypass operation, that most quants accept as part of the job. Incidentally, she was interviewed for “Frontline” about the financial crisis and all its dysfunctionalities way back here:
Cathy lives in New York city (which is apparently do-able though I’ve never quite understood how?). There, her son Aise sometimes performs standup comedy at the Gotham Comedy Club. Below is one of his earlier club performances (…which, by the way, I take as proof-positive of at least a one-time rendezvous between Cathy and Steven Wright some decades ago… not that that’s any of our business... all of which kinda reminds me of that time when I had a skylight installed at my apartment, making my upstairs neighbors furious!):
She has another son who's name I couldn't find (though I feel safe in guessing it isn't "Archie"), and a third son named “Wolfie” — now THAT is a great name! (…but then I think the whole world would be better off if all kids were named after plants or animals — in fact, if you wish, you have permission, like my first girlfriend, to henceforth, simply call me “Stallion”).
Uhhhh, moving on….
Cathy doesn’t seem to like to do anything for too long a time (a clear case of A.D.H.B... Attention Darting Hither and Beyond), and following quant-hood she started a blog on the Web under the moniker “Mathbabe;” a place for, in her words, “exploring and venting about quantitative issues” — with, dare-I-say, emphasis on the present-participle “venting.” Cathy is one of the best ranters around. And she can rant on all manner of things; doesn’t have to be something mathematical, like the quadratic formula or credit default swaps. She could probably rant about baseball or apple pie or even Matt Damon if the need arose. She’s as good and lively a writer as there is in the expository-quantitative-in-your-face-opinionated-digitized-and-emojied world of bloggerland.
At a certain point on the blog, Cathy introduced an alter-ego “Aunt Pythia” as an advice columnist, covering all manner of human foibles. If you’ve ever had an issue, question, or sorrow regarding the human heart or state of affairs, I suggest you read all her past columns, because somewhere buried therein you will likely find an answer to your woes (and besides, Ann Landers is long deceased… and was a tad stodgy in her day — one thing that Cathy and Aunt Pythia are NOT, is stodgy).
Like so many bipedal primates, Dr. O’Neil has had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Twitter over the years (or perhaps more of a tolerate/hate relationship), so she has periods of extended non-presence on the platform (and, like most sane and decent carbon-based lifeforms, she has dropped Facebook altogether). I assume Nassim Taleb has her blocked, but YOU can follow her on Twitter at @mathbabedotorg.
Her husband is also a mathematician (at Columbia)… funny how often mathematicians marry other mathematicians; I mean for the sake of the gene pool shouldn’t mathematicians be marrying sociologists or English lit majors or maybe New York city sanitation workers, just to, you know, kinda mix up all that DNA and mitochondria, and keep the species going?Just something to ponder... before we all expire from climate change anyway. Que sera sera.
In 2016, Cathy came out with her first book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” all about societal dangers inherent to the algorithms that now run our lives and turn us into numbers, if not zombies (as she puts it, "algorithms are opinions embedded in code"). It was easily the best book title since Steven Strogatz’s “The Joy of X,” which was easily the best title since Erica Jong’s “Fear Of Flying” (which just barely beats out THIS item). I cited Cathy’s book as my own “math-book-of-the-year” for 2016 (…and yet never received a single ruble under the table from Cathy in return; still, I shan’t retract).
She covers many of the book’s main ideas in this TED talk:
Cathy was active in the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011 (apparently thinking, in adorable fashion, that masses of passionate young people with body rings could stop the upper 1% from siphoning off everyone else’s life savings to off-shore bank accounts). Since she got involved, I think the Dow Jones average has risen about 931%, not that she, nor I, nor any other vassal will ever see any of that, with income-inequality now fully invoked as the Sharia law of the land.
I always especially enjoyed her take on the weekly Slate Money Podcast which, like other projects, she departed, despite there never having been even a hint of financial harassment from male host Felix Salmon.
She now writes short opinion pieces for Bloomberg, but honestly, they don’t have the punch and pizazz of her blog writing (though they may help pay for pet treats — I was not able to find out if Cathy owns a Pit Bull, a Rottweiler, or a Doberman, and will stand in utter disbelief if informed she owns a Labradoodle):
Her next project, started in 2017, was her own consulting company, “O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithm Auditing,” a bit of a mouthful, but shortened to ORCAA for seafaring clients. Yo Google, I think you should put her on retainer! And Goldman Sachs, you too (...and don't forget her Christmas bonus!).
Her company runs third-party audits on tech algorithms that are employed by businesses, for their fairness and legitimacy. Of course finding companies that are interested in fairness or legitimacy markedly limits your potential clientele (...but perhaps Equifax or Wells Fargo can help her find some). Anyway, a couple of previous articles on her work here:
She’s also now actively writing her second book, this time on “shame,” very timely for the 83% of Twitter users who have been publicly shamed at one point or another. And then there are the 52% of white adult women who voted for Trump in 2016 and probably deserve a whole chapter all to themselves (…it will be entitled, “What the %#@!*(&%!!! Hell Were You Numbskulls Thinking or Were You in a Botox-induced Coma At the Time, Just Askin'?”).
Cathy’s been known to dye her hair teal, strongly indicating a genealogical link at some point to Evelyn Lamb who did the same and who I profiled before. I’m guessing the common ancestor in both of their lineages may be Susan B. Anthony; though it's possible they both came up through the Pocahontas-Elizabeth Warren line?
You sort of never know what Cathy will do next (but you know it will be good)… In fact I’m a little surprised she isn’t running for President right now; heck, I’m pretty certain she’d draw more support than Kirsten Gillibrand.
What ya gotta love about Dr. O’Neil is that she’s just out there — if something’s on her mind, she just says it… out loud… no beating around the bush or weasel words. WYSIWYG. And her heart seems to always be in the right place… left of center, right above her liver.
We need more people like Cathy out there fighting the good fight and being vocal about it (like Jeff Tiedrich)… so that if Donald somehow manages to get mindlessly re-elected (because 52% of white women are apparently certifiably nuts), many of us will at least have good company on that eventual cattle-car ride we're given to a camp in Idaho (and if for some reason I can’t travel with Cathy then I want Andy Borowitz by my side).
To conclude, Cathy names 97-year-old Betty White as one of her idols, saying she wants to be just like Betty when she’s older, so what better way to end than with a couple of episodes of “Betty’s Happy Hour”:
[and there’s plenty more where these come from]
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