Data science, also known as data-driven science, is an interdisciplinary field about scientific methods, processes, and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to data mining.
But the good guys have to be good programmers don't they? This is cutting edge but in the end you are going to create the algorithms and implement them.
Is that closer?
yes, that is much closer. Data Science is more about Statistics and Machine Learning and Predictive Modeling than about software maintenance.