Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an essayist, philosopher of randomness, researcher, and practitioner of financial mathematics. As a pioneer of complex financial derivatives, he had as a "day job" a lengthy senior trading career in New York City's Wall Street firms, before he reduced his financial mathematics activities to start a second career as an epistemologist of chance events and focus on the development of his black swan theory of unexpected rare events. Taleb's literary approach is to provide a modern-day brand of philosophical tale by mixing narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, with scientific commentary in a style similar to Milan Kundera, Ismail Kadare, and Alain de Botton.

Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb