Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. Part literary essayist,  part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical  trader, he is currently taking a break by serving as  the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at  Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by  Randomness, has been published in twenty languages. Taleb lives mostly in New York.