Nassim Nicholas Taleb, born on 12 September 1960, is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist known for his work on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.

Taleb is the author of Incerto, a five-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018, notably including The Black Swan and Antifragile. He has served as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008 and has been co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014. Taleb's career also includes roles as a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader. Currently, he is listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments. His 2007 book, The Black Swan, was highlighted by The Sunday Times as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Taleb has criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates for a "black swan robust" society, which can withstand difficult-to-predict events, and proposes "antifragility" in systems, which means an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility. He also suggests "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, emphasizing that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.