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Am I the sexiest thing about the 21st century?
September 20, 2012
Hey, I didn’t say it – mathbabe is much too modest!
It was the Harvard Business Review’s Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.
I kind of like it how they refer to us data scientists as wanting to “be on the bridge” with Captain Kirk: true. And they refer to the “care and feeding” of data scientists like we are so many bison. Turns out we need to be free-range bison. Mooo (do bison moo?).
I’m blogging about the third week of the Data Science course at Columbia later this morning, but I couldn’t resist this title.
Categories: data science
mathbabe 
Be careful what you wish for. Financial engineer was probably the sexiest job of the 1990s-2000s by this standard. I wouldn’t take the Harvard Business Review as an authority.
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Agreed!
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But you personally probably are the sexiest thing about the 21st century. . .
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The first few paragraphs of the cited article describe Jonathan Goldman’s providing LinkedIn users with names of people “they hadn’t yet connected with but seemed likely to know,” giving as an example “‘triangle closing’ — the notion that if you know Larry and Sue, there’s a good chance that Larry and Sue know each other.”
Shortly after the beginning of my senior year in college 31 years ago, unaware of this small-world phenomenon at the time, I noticed what seemed to be, given the size of Seattle, a remarkably unexpected web of social connections among 17 friends, coworkers, housemates, etc. I graphed it all out using a nickel for the nodes and handed out photocopies to all 17 people. Included were little observations here and there, such as 6 out of the 17 having the same astrological sign (Libra).
My probability professor, who was also a statistician, didn’t find the graph surprising.
For the record Cathy, we may have a mutual acquaintance: a doctoral student of Ken Ribet’s named Leanne. You may have both been in Berkeley at the same time. She is married to a close friend of mine named Craig (we grew up three houses apart). I know both Craig and Leanne very well.
In an unrelated connection, I also happen to be well acquainted with one of Ribet’s high school classmates, Stanley Rabinowitz. But I’ve never met Ken Ribet himself (apart from knowing of him through his mathematical fame).
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mathbabe is indeed sexy! Bright, articulate, energetic and beautiful (saw you on PBS).
BTW you might enjoy The Bletchley Circle, a UK female quant crime tv mini series set in the 1950’s. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2275990/
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