Green Math: Can Abstract Category Theory Help Tame Earth’s Complexity?

Natalie Wolchover surveys applied category theory—an abstract branch of math that models systems by their relationships—to see if it can help tame Earth's complexity. While climate modeling remains hard and skepticism persists, practitioners have already built tools like StockFlow for epidemiology and are applying category-theoretic reasoning to AI safety, suggesting that highly abstract math could eventually improve how we understand and govern real-world systems.