Conversations and media reports about the Coronavirus pandemic usually go hand-in-hand with the word ‘unprecedented’. It got me thinking about Black Swan events.
The 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal is the first to use the phrase in his Satire, writing about something that was “as rare as a Black Swan.” It has been picked up more recently by mathematics scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his 2010 book The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable.