Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent two decades as a risk taker before becoming a full-time essayist and scholar focusing on practical and philosophical problems with chance, luck, and probability. His focus in on how different systems handle disorder. He now spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés. In addition to his life as a trader he spent several years as a Distinguished Professor at New York University's School of Engineering and also as Dean's Professor at U. Mass Amherst. Taleb's books--Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and The Bed of Procrustes--have more than one hundred translations in forty-one languages.