Skip to product information
1 of 1

Click to look inside

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'neil

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free UK delivery over £5
  • 10% off preloved books when you join +Plus
  • Buying preloved emits 46% less CO2 than new
  • Give your books a new home - sell them back to us!

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'neil

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric--with a new afterword

A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.--Financial Times

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - The Boston Globe - Wired - Fortune - Kirkus Reviews - The Guardian - Nature - On Point

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.

But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination--propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
Cathy O'Neil is a data scientist and author of the blog mathbabe.org. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and taught at Barnard College before moving to the private sector, where she worked for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. She then worked as a data scientist at various start-ups, building models that predict people's purchases and clicks. O'Neil started the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia and is the author of Doing Data Science. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg View.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780553418811
ISBN 10 0553418815
Title Weapons of Math Destruction
Author Cathy O'neil
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Year published 2016-09-06
Number of pages 272
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.