Sam L. Savage

Dr. Sam L. Savage is author of The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty (John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 2012), and Executive Director of ProbabilityManagement.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to the communication and calculation of uncertainty. The organization has received funding from Chevron, Kaiser Permanente, Highmark Health, Lockheed Martin, PG&E, and others. Harry Markowitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics, was a co-founding board member. Dr. Savage received his Ph.D. in computational complexity from Yale University, then began his career as a mathematician at the General Motors Research Laboratory. From there he taught at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business for 15 years before moving to Stanford in 1990. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and is also a Fellow of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. Throughout his career, Dr. Savage has consulted widely to industry and served as an expert in litigation, and his writing reflects his experiences on both the academic and practical side of what he calls “the algebraic curtain separating managers from management science.” Dr. Savage is the inventor of the Stochastic Information Packet (SIP), an auditable data array for conveying uncertainty, which served as a basis for the nonprofit's open SIPmath™ Standard. This standard has been adopted by software firms such as Frontline Systems and Lumina Decision Systems. In his own words, Dr. Savage says: “I am not a dispassionate observer, but a promoter who models himself after that great medieval huckster, Fibonacci, who foisted Hindu-Arabic numerals on an unsuspecting Western Civilization in 1199. At ProbabilityManagement.org, we are trying to create the Hindu-Arabic Numerals of Uncertainty."