Talk:Cathy O'Neil

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Who hopes[edit]

The "who hopes" clause tacked onto the lede sentence just begs to have this entire article deleted, unless Cathy promptly proves some important unsolved conjecture. — MaxEnt 14:02, 17 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That stuff was pretty dumb, so i rewrote the article. The blog is very famous in mathematics circles--she's much better known for it than her research--but in terms of notability, I can't quantify its fame. --dmf — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.144.176.250 (talk) 15:52, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Promotional tone, self-sourced content[edit]

The article has a highly promotional flavor, full of factoids that are either unsourced or sourced to things like speaker bios that O'Neil supplied for talks she gave (which are largely self-marketing for her algo auditing company).

I'm for removing anything that isn't authored by an identified third party source, such as a journalist at a newspaper. This would improve NPOV and reduce the potential for misuse of the article for advertisement. 73.234.13.160 (talk) 03:17, 8 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've begun making edits to address this and hope to revisit the article later. 73.234.13.160 (talk) 03:51, 8 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Mathematician" in first sentence[edit]

I'm hesitant to change this without asking on the talk page, so here goes.

The opening sentence calls O'Neil a "mathematician, data scientist and author". All the sources, however, characterize her as a data scientist, data analyst and/or blogger, usually adding the information that she holds a Harvard math PhD or has "taught mathematics at Barnard". Independent secondary sources are about her work in data science, not mathematics. I don't think there are sources establishing her notability as a mathematician or math professor in either the informal or WP:PROF sense. Calling her a "former mathematician" would be WP:OR and could be construed as insulting. I think the most accurate is to remove "mathematician" and describe her as a "data scientist, author, and blogger", which are in fact the things she is known for, while mentioning the PhD and undergraduate award separately as is done later in the page. "Former mathematics professor" would also be accurate, though as with mathematician, it is not what she is known for or written up about (by independent sources). 73.234.13.160 (talk) 01:56, 17 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Searching a bit more, I see she is described as mathematician in more recent articles. It would be interesting if that were WP:CIRCULAR sourcing derived from this page (earlier articles having called her a data scientist/analyst) but in any event it is sufficient sourcing for calling her a "mathematician". 73.234.13.160 (talk) 23:25, 18 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]