What is data science?

What is data science?

According to Wikipedia “Data science is an inter-disciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from […] data.” This is a pretty good definition!

In mechanical engineering applications, “scientific methods” come in the form of physical laws. So, in our context, data science is about combining domain knowledge (dynamics, mechanics of materials, fluid mechanics, etc.) with data. This connection between data and domain knowledge is not ad hoc. The “glue” is provided by probability theory and statistics. This course is giving you the foundations you need to start learning more, or more precisely, the foundation we can fit in one credit…