The term, data science, as mentioned earlier, was first proposed in the 1960s and 1970s by Peter Naur. In the late 1990s, Jeff Wu, while at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, proposed the term in a formal paper titled Statistics = Data Science?. The paper, which Prof. Wu subsequently presented at the seventh series of P.C. Mahalonobis Lectures at the Indian Statistical Institute in 1998, raised some interesting questions about what an appropriate definition of statistics might be in light of the tasks that a statistician did beyond numerical calculations.

In the paper Prof. Wu highlighted the concept of Statistical Trilogy, consisting of data collection, data modeling and analysis, and problem solving. The following sections reflected upon the future directions in which Dr. Wu raised the prospects of neural network models to model complex, non-linear relationships, the use of cross validation to improve model performance, and data mining of large-scale data among others. [Source: https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jeffwu/presentations/datascience.pdf].

The paper, although written more than 20 years ago, is a reflection of the foresight that a few academicians such as Dr. Wu had at the time, which has been realized in full, almost verbatim as it was propositioned back then, both in thought and practical concepts. A copy of Dr. Wu's paper is available at https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jeffwu/presentations/datascience.pdf.