Abbout Cathy O'Neil: Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She is co-authoring a book (with Rachel Schutt) called “Doing Data Science” to be published by O’Reilly in Fall 2013. She previously worked as a quant 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. For the last couple years she’s been a data scientist in the New York start-up scene. She writes a blog at mathbabe.org and is involved with the #Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Working Group.