#97 Disney Data Scientist Eric Leung on Math, Medicine, and Learning to Code

Eric Leung grew up in Oklahoma and learned a lot of math in high school. His friends wanted to go to medical school and he originally planned to join them. But instead he got interested in the emerging field of bioinformatics – math applied to medicine. After 6 years in graduate school, he made the big decision to leave without completing his Ph.D. But he was able to transition into the field of data science, and he now works as a data scientist at Disney. Eric and I met up at a public library here in Dallas, Texas to talk about his journey into data science, including his time spent learning through freeCodeCamp and ultimately contributing to our open source codebase. We also share our love of the US public library system, where we met to record this and where Eric worked when he was younger. And we talk about the ancient board game of Go. If you dig this podcast, you should leave us a review in whichever podcast player you're listening. It helps more people discover the show. Download some of our previous podcasts to your phone so you'll have something to listen to the next time you're offline. And tell your friends. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themsleves in tech. Eric Leung's freeCodeCamp articles: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/erictleung/ Eric on Twitter: https://twitter.com/erictleung The Standup Maths Minecraft Speed Run Cheating Scandal we talk about during the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU The AlphaGo documentary about Deep Mind's efforts to conquer the ancient game of Go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y XKCD comic on when to automate things: https://xkcd.com/1205/ Math for Programmers book: https://www.manning.com/books/math-for-programmers Street Fighting Math MIT course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-098-street-fighting-mathematics-january-iap-2008/