KATERINA WU ALWAYS LOVED HOCKEY. Same with numbers.
But the concept of marrying those two in a career like she has now, as senior data scientist for the Pittsburgh Penguins? That revelation came about, fittingly, through healthy competition -- and, admittedly, a dash of "pure spite."
"One of my friends [in college] made a bet with me that my team wouldn't make the playoffs," Wu told ESPN. "And I tried to use statistics basically to prove him wrong by running my own playoff simulation to calculate the probability that my team was going to make the playoffs.