Sam 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 Chancification: How to Fix the Flaw of Averages (2022). He is Executive Director of ProbabilityManagement.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to the communication and calculation of uncertainty. The organization has received funding from several large corporations, and 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 before moving to Stanford. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. The discipline of probability management grew out of work at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School in 2005 with Professor Stefan Scholtes and Daniel Zweidler (then of Shell). Dr. Savage remained a Fellow of the Judge until 2022. Throughout his career, Dr. Savage has consulted widely to industry and served as an expert in litigation. His writing reflects his experiences on both the academic and practical side of what he calls “The Algebraic Curtain separating Managers from Management Science.”