Why you don't need much math to learn data science

Math is the easy part. Having the intellect to understand what the numbers coming out of the sausage machine is harder. As always, the incentive is to ignore all that difficult stuff ... Look ma, I am soooo machine learned!

Sometimes I feel strange in the "data science" field. I did a sociology degree in a small Spanish university (UDC) and I found the Multivariate Statistics course way harder than almost anything out there.

I do struggle with programming though. Not really the logical part, but even in R plotting something that would be simple in Excel or SPSS is quite tricky. Maybe it is because I'm not a native english speaker but how stuff is named is weird and doesn't make much sense to me, so it becomes harder to memorize.

For example, why did they choose str() for a quick view of data frames? To me that reads naturally like "string()", so it would make sense to use it for doing stuff with strings.

That's why, while I do use R, I really love tools like KNIME above all. Maybe it's just a matter of keep doing it, but while other people seems "fluent" with R o Python I really can't do much without documentation, and some trial and error.