From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 46:
Carlos Slim, who studied engineering in college and taught algebra and linear programming as an undergraduate, attributes his fortune to his facility with numbers. So does Steve Schwarzman, who told me he owed his success to his “ability to see patterns that other people don’t see” in large collections of numbers. People inside the super- elite think the rise of the data geeks is just beginning. Elliot Schrage is a member of the tech aristocracy— he was the communications director for Google when it was the hottest company in the Valley and jumped to the same role at Facebook just as it was becoming a behemoth. At a 2009 talk he gave to an internal company meeting of education and publishing executives, Schrage was asked what field we should encourage our children to study. His instant answer was statistics, because the ability to understand data would be the most powerful skill in the twenty- first century.
How does this intersect with the (purported) rise of the data scientist as the ‘sexist job of the 21st century‘?
Mark Carrigan 