Foreword
In 2008, Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, stated:1
I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians …. The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids.
Varian makes it clear he was really talking about what we now call a “data scientist,” not a traditional statistician. So what is this skill set? How is a data scientist different from a statistician, mathematician, or computer scientist? And why does Varian call it sexy?
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