Biography

Nassim Nicholas TALEB

2009 ranking: 40

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb originates from Amioun, Lebanon. His political Greek Orthodox Levantine family saw its prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War which began in 1975. He is the son of Dr. Najib Taleb, an oncologist and researcher in anthropology, and Minerva Ghosn. Both sides of his family were politically prominent in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox community: on his mother's side, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were both deputy prime ministers of Lebanon; on his father's side, his grandfather was a supreme court judge and, in 1861, his great-great-great-great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.

Taleb received his bachelors and masters in science from the University of Paris and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Management Science from the University of Paris (Dauphine) under the direction of Hélyette Geman.

Taleb, a polyglot, has a literary fluency in English, French, and classical Arabic, a conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish, and reads classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew, as well as the Canaanite script.

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