Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) (Arabic: نسيم نيقولا نجيب طالب‎) (alternative spellings of first name: Nessim or Nissim) is a literary essayist , epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance. A specialist in financial derivatives (while critical of the industry), he held a "day job" in a lengthy senior trading and financial mathematics career in a number of New York City's Wall Street firms, before starting a second career as a scholar in the epistemology of chance events to focus on his project of mapping how to live and act in a world we do not understand, and how to come to grips with randomness and the unknown —which includes his black swan theory of unexpected rare events. Taleb has also, in the wake of the economic crisis that started in 2008, become an activist for a "Black Swan robust society".

Taleb's writing style mixes narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, and short philosophical tales, with historical and scientific commentary . 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.

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