Nicholas Nassim Taleb is an applied statistician and derivatives trader-turned-philosopher cum epistemologist, and author of Bestsellers such as "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chances in Life and Markets" and "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable".

Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in financial mathematics from the University of Paris. He is currently Visiting Professor of Marketing at London Business School, the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center.

Taleb's 'Fooled by Randomness' was a bestseller in 2001 while 'The Black Swan' has already found its place in the New York Times bestsellers list.

On his website www.fooledbyrandomness.com, Taleb speaks about 'Fooled by Randomness' in detail. Here are a few excerpts - "This book is about luck perceived and disguised as nonluck (that is, skills), and randomness perceived and disguised as nonrandomness (that is, determinism). It manifests itself in the shape of thelucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason. 

Please note that it is not a finance book (or not directly so): it is about the role of Luck.  I do not learn from a variety of disciplines, say complex biophysics, sandpile theories or astrology and try to apply the ideas to an investment strategies. I just learned from my day job about more general matters –the vicious role of uncertainty and how foolish I was dealing with randomness. There are plenty of finance books written by a variety of gurus for those looking for a recipe: This is a personal essay, a literary personal essay, nothing more, nothing else."