Cathy O'Neil

Mathematician and algorithmic-accountability advocate; founder of ORCAA (O'Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing), the algorithmic-auditing consulting practice operationalising the argument of Weapons of Math Destruction (Crown, 2016), the named publication most often credited with putting the term algorithmic accountability into general public circulation.

O'Neil earned her PhD in mathematics from Harvard in 1999 under Barry Mazur and worked at D.E. Shaw & Co. as a quantitative analyst from 2007 before pivoting, following the 2008 financial crisis, into the Occupy Wall Street movement's Alternative Banking Group — the named entry point into algorithmic-accountability advocacy. Her mathbabe.org blog was the personal-publishing venue on which the book's arguments were rehearsed before publication; her Bloomberg View opinion column the named mainstream-press venue for the book's ongoing public-policy register.