Mathematics: The Tao of Data Science · Harvard Data Science Review

Confucius once said, "Fish forget they live in water; people forget they live in the Tao" (Lin, 2007). Analogously, it may be easy for data scientists to forget they live in a world defined and permeated by mathematics. The two pieces, "Ten Research Challenge Areas in Data Science" by Jeannette M. Wing and "Challenges and Opportunities in Statistics and Data Science: Ten Research Areas" by Xuming He and Xihong Lin, provide an impressively complete list of data science challenges from luminaries in the field of data science. They have done an extraordinary job, so this response offers a complementary viewpoint from a mathematical perspective and evangelizes advanced mathematics as a key tool for meeting the challenges they have laid out. Notably, we pick up the themes of scientific understanding of machine learning and deep learning, computational considerations such as cloud computing and scalability, balancing computational and statistical considerations, and inference with limited data.