I have seen a plethora of job advertisements in the last few years on mathjobs.org for academic positions in data science. Now I understand why economic pressures would cause this to happen, but from a traditional view of university organization, but how does data science fit in?
I would have guessed that at most, a research group having to do with something labeled "data science" could be formed as an interdisciplinary project between applied mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists, with corporate funding. But I don't see why it is a fundamentally distinct intellectual endeavor, prompting mathematics hires specifically in data science.
The first time I heard the term “data science,” it was said that they wanted to take PhD’s who had experience in statistically analyzing large data sets, and train them for a few weeks to apply these skills to marketing and advertising. Now just a few years later people want to hire professors of this.
Question: What about data science is particularly interesting from a mathematical point of view?
Best Answer
I will stay away from the academic politics of hiring "professors of data science", but if I interpret the question more specifically as "does data science offer problems of mathematical interest", I might refer to Bandeira's list of 42 Open Problems in Mathematics of Data Science.
(The full list from 2016 is here, and Bandeira's home page links to solutions of some of these.)