January 14, 2020 | 10:30 am
Rehearsal Hall
Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil is the author of the New York Times bestselling Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, which was also a semifinalist for the National Book Award. She is a columnist for Bloomberg View and founded the company ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.

She earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoctoral fellow in the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quantitative analyst for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks.

Cathy wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a columnist for Bloomberg View.

The Fran Park Center and Pinnacle Presbyterian Church is pleased to once again host the January Series from Calvin College. The January Series cultivates deep thought and conversations about important issues of the day in order to inspire cultural renewal and make us better global citizens in God's world.