[manvillej]

you go to school for it. Stats, applied mathematics, operations research, industrial engineering.

I went for industrial engineering. we learned the math as pure math, then the math as free language problems, then how to identify and collect data to identify their attributes, then simulate and verify those processes, then test for variations in the underlying assumptions of those processes.

They never really did teach me to code well in a language that was useful, I had to pick that one up myself.