In the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus published a system for classifying living things, which has been developed into the modern classification system. People have always given names to things that they see, but Linnaeus was the first scientist to develop a hierarchal naming structure that conveyed information both about what the species was and also its closest relatives. Today there are classification systems or taxonomy for everything. ReliaWire brought this interesting information to us in their article, “An Objective Classification Algorithm For Brain Cells.”
A new system for distinguishing cell types in the brain represents an algorithmic classification method that will benefit the entire field of neuroscience. For the first time, this information shows that objective classification of pyramidal cells is possible by applying tools from algebraic topology, a branch of mathematics that studies the shape, connectivity and the emergence of global structure from local constraints.
This is an essential first step towards a better understanding of the brain’s basic building blocks.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
