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Celebrating the 5th-annual White House Science Fair on March 23rd, the White House Blog--and the
Noether was one of the few women to pursue a math-related career in and outside of academia in the early 20th century. Today, 45 percent of mathematicians and statisticians in the US are women, according to the 2012 American Community Survey.
A sub-set of these women combine their facility with numbers with writing and general communication skills to provide guidance and instruction to those who want to join the data analysis profession, where well-paying jobs abound today. Meta S. Brown has just published a compilation of 262 profiles of women who wrote books on statistical analysis, data science, data mining, analytics, and other related topics. "Don't miss out on half the talent in the analytics field,” says Brown, “When you're looking for analytics talent, look for women!" Brown herself has recently published Data Mining for Dummies (I reviewed it here) and has coached data miners in analytics communication and storytelling.
The importance of the analytical work summarized and explained by these 262 women authors was envisioned more than a century and a half ago: “A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.”
This accurate prediction came from Ada Lovelace, another woman who mastered both numbers and words. She called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician),” and was the first to grasp that Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (the godfather of today’s computers) could go beyond mere calculation to influence how science works and how new discoveries are made.
She also understood the importance of imagination to scientific inquiry: “What is imagination? It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions, in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations… It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”
In this she anticipated Albert Einstein’s much-quoted observation: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Babbage called Ada “the enchantress of numbers.” The works of the 262 women authors Brown features in her compilation showcase the ability of the human mind not just to captivate numbers but also words, and the incredible human faculty of imagination. Without it, you can’t write books, design a model, discover new facts and create new ideas. Which is why machines will never replace us and human data analysts will always be needed.
