Data scientist has been called "the sexiest job of the 21st century," presumably by someone who has never visited a fire station. Nonetheless, data science is a hot and growing field, and it doesn't take a great deal of sleuthing to find analysts breathlessly prognosticating that over the next 10 years, we'll need billions and billions more data scientists than we currently have. But what is data science? After all, we can't produce data scientists if we don't know what data science is. According to a Venn diagram that is somewhat famous in the industry, data science lies at the intersection of:

- Hacking skills

- Math and statistics knowledge

- Substantive expertise.