John Baez, Maxwell Fellow in Public Engagement, and Tom Leinster, Professor of Category Theory, were interviewed by journalist Natalie Wolchover for a feature story titled, 'Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place?' In 2011, John called for the development of 'green mathematics' and sought to apply category theory, a highly abstract branch of maths, to model the Earth's biosphere and climate. Category theory was first developed to transport ideas from one branch of mathematics to another, for example from topology to algebra, and can now be used to model the heterogeneous parts of complex systems. While applied category theory hasn't yet gained traction in climate science, it has newfound applications to address societal problems including AI safety. The article explores Baez' recent work with the Topos Institute, which involves epidemiological modelling of disease outbreaks. John explains, "If you’re writing a model in conventional software and you type ‘35’ into your program, that doesn’t tell you whether it’s 35 dollars or 35 people or 35 doses of a drug. And so you’re conflating those all as just numbers, and that makes it easier to make mistakes."Read the article to learn more:Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place? | Quanta Magazine Publication date 19 Mar, 2026
