Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is the fifty-third of Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Contributing writer, John Mason, reports on our fifty-third pathbreaker is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese American essayist, mathematical statistician, former options trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. He has deep roots in Lebanon, his Greek Orthodox Christian family having played important roles in government dating from the mid-18th century to the country’s 1975 civil war. Taleb has strong, philosophically based opinions on the Hamas-Israel war.