The PRQL: Farm to Table Abstract Mathematics

Eric Dodds 00:05
Welcome to The Data Stack Show prequel where we talk about the show that we just recorded to give you a little teaser, Costas. Here’s the teaser. What do you get when you cross a White House advisor, a venture capitalists, a math professor, and an entrepreneur,

Kostas Pardalis 00:23
you get so deep research directly to your table. You remember, like this thing that you called? Like, from, like, the farmer to your table like and like the table? Yeah, that’s fun to do. Exactly. Like, it’s from MIT to your screen, like, that’s what you get.

Eric Dodds 00:44
So that’s so right. It’s vertical. It’s, it is completely, it’s complete vertical integration. From foundational math, to your user experience. That’s incredible. You also get a really good podcast episode, which we just recorded. And it was so interesting, we talked about our guests advising the Obama administration on AI. And we talked about category theory and sort of fundamental mathematics. So what there’s so many things that people could get excited about, and hopefully, we’ve given them a good teaser. But what did you love most about the episode we just recorded?

Kostas Pardalis 01:23
I mean, okay, first of all, you have someone who has like, very unique experience of solving problems at scale. Because and when I say problems at scale, I mean, like, if you have someone who is advising the white cows, and communicating, like with the literature of other countries like to do like legislation and try to understand the market like AI has, like, that’s like a completely different level of key when you’re solving a problem, right? Which is not technical, necessarily, but in terms of like, or organizational level, or like, it’s like, completely different level, right. So that’s like something that I think it’s like, very, very interesting. And something that I think everyone will enjoy is like how you have like a person who has like, such a deep knowledge of very, let’s say, just like technical things, but also, I mean, we are thinking about like some very, let’s say, abstract mathematical terms here, right? And how good he is in like, articulating like, the meaning of all that stuff in a way that like, pretty much like everyone can understand. So that’s like one of the things that’s it really motivates me like to try and but in doing these, like, I think it’s like a very important skill of like everyone who’s doing like, any kind of technical work or like business around like technology, we should like, try and nurture these skills much, much more than we already do. So that’s one thing. And the other is about the technology itself, and how things that we might think that they are solved. The we just need to re solve them again, when the scale changes, right. So yeah, aligning the data models with new databases might be something that like we can do right now. But if you have like to scale this problem to like 30, or 3000, data bases, then you need to go back on the blackboards and create some new mathematics to drive that. So yeah, I think we will have like, we’ll get a taste of this today.

Eric Dodds 03:36
Yep. Well definitely tune in. We talk about blackboards in the MIT math department. We talk about Ubers 300,000 databases, and of course category theory and the White House so you are not going to want to miss this one.