[ced]

Computational geometry??? That's a new one for me. Do you mean only linear/convex programming?

Incidentally, I would really like to hear about the kind of Real Work that data scientists end up doing with TBs of data, because I'm always fuzzy on the details. MCMC? Variational methods? SVMs? Or is it more oriented towards frequentist statistical methods, applied at "web-scale"?

[jandrewrogers]

I mean actual computational geometry. Reality is significantly non-Euclidean in complicated ways that have to be accounted for if precision matters.

Spatio-temporal analytics or the processing of sensing data frequently requires this. For a simple example, the surface of the Earth is approximately an oblate spheroidal surface, not even a 2-sphere. You can use Euclidean approximations for many cartographic purposes but for analytics this can introduce large errors in the analysis. Understanding how to compute non-Euclidean geometry models is surprisingly useful.