The Rithm Is Gonna Get You

MathBabe Cathy O’Neil is out to stop the Big Data monster.

- Katherine Burton

The decision to leave her job as a tenure-track math professor at Barnard College and join hedge fund D.E. Shaw in 2007 seemed like a no-brainer. Cathy O’Neil would apply her math skills to the financial markets and make three times the pay. What could go wrong?

Less than a year later, subprime mortgages imploded, the financial crisis set in, and so-called math wizards were targets for blame. “The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all that had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas,” she writes in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown, $26).

The book chronicles O’Neil’s odyssey from math-loving nerd clutching a Rubik’s Cube to Occupy Wall Streeter pushing for banking reform; along the way, she learns how algorithms—models used by governments, schools, and companies to find patterns in data—can produce nasty, or at least unintended, consequences (the WMDs of her title).