Catherine ("Cathy") Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the founder of the blog mathbabe.org and has written books on data science, including the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction. Her opinion columns are published in Bloomberg View. She is a former Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's Tow Center.
In 1993 O'Neil was awarded the Alice T. Schafer Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics and in 2019 she won the MAA's Euler Book Prize for her book Weapons of Math Destruction.
She lives in New York City and was active in the Occupy movement.
Bio sourced from Wikipedia.
On Thinkr
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Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Read the insightsAlgorithms aren’t always seamless strings of coding that translate reality into perfect equations. Rather, algorithms are human creations subject to the same mistakes their users often fall prey to, presenting missteps as insights and using the currency of fact to validate flaws. As the financial world, higher education, and the political realm bend to the numerical whims of algorithms, society grows further from the ideal it wishes to create and imperils those it strives to help. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil exposes the deceptive algorithms our culture has grown dangerously reliant upon, cautioning us to do the math for ourselves, while encouraging everyone to think more critically about the processes which are turning society into an imbalanced equation.