Eric Daimler at Conexus says Forget Calculus, Today's Coders Need to Know Category Theory

<p>Harry's guest Eric Daimler, a serial software entrepreneur and a former Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration, has an interesting argument about math. If you’re a young person today trying to decide which math course you’re going to take—or maybe an old person who just wants to brush up—he says you shouldn’t bother with trigonometry or calculus. Instead he says you should study <i>category theory. </i>An increasingly important in computer science, category theory is about the relationships between sets or structures. It can be used to prove that different structures are consistent or compatible with one another, and to prove that the relationships in a dataset are still intact even after the data has been transformed in some way. Together with two former MIT mathematicians, Daimler co-founded a company called Conexus that uses category theory to tackle the problem of data interoperability. </p><p>Longtime listeners know that data interoperability in healthcare, or more often the <i>lack </i>of interoperability, is a repeating theme of the show. In fields from drug development to frontline medical care, we’ve got petabytes of data to work with, in the form of electronic medical records, genomic and proteomic data, and clinical trial data. That data could be the fuel for machine learning and other kinds of computation that could help us make develop drugs faster and make smarter decisions about care. The problem is, it’s all stored in different databases and formats that can’t be safely merged without a nightmarish amount of work. So when someone like Daimler says they have a way to use math to bring heterogeneous data together without compromising that data’s integrity – well, it's time to pay attention. That's why on today’s show, we’re all going back to school for an introductory class in category theory.</p><p><strong>Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! </strong>Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:</p><p><strong>1. </strong>Open the Po