Taleb, N. N. (2025). Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails, third edition. arXiv:2001.10488v4
The chapter 1–6 guides use this edition, printed pp. 3–6, 7–21, 25–68, 69–89, 91–105 and 107–120; chapter 5 also covers appendix B, pp. 127–133, and chapter 6 covers appendix A, pp. 121–125. Each guide maps checked section/page locators to the relevant concept notes.
Each chapter page is a reading guide that links to the relevant concept notes. It is not a substitute for reading the book; it is a companion that fills notation gaps, adds proofs, and connects ideas.
| Chapter | Topic | Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter 1 — Prologue | Assumptions behind tail summaries | Tail class catalog, Cramér condition, Regular variation |
| Chapter 2 — Glossary, definitions, and notations | Probability, conditional size, and tail limits | Counting exceedances, Pareto, EVI |
| Chapter 3 — Non-technical overview | Inference and exposure | Inference asymmetry, payoffs, ruin, decentralization |
| Chapter 4 — Finite-moment fat tails | Mixtures, curvature, and estimation | Variance mixtures, Body, shoulders, and tails, Moment estimation |
| Chapter 5 — Subexponentials and power laws | Tail classes, sums, products, and entropy constraints | Regular variation, Subexponentiality, Karamata, Maximum entropy |
| Chapter 6 — Thick tails in higher dimensions | Dependence, information, spectra and regimes | Multivariate tails, Density geometry, Tail class catalog |
| 7 | Planned guide | Planned; no page published |