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Relax! I will not indict chocolate chip cookies as the cause of heart disease. Rather, the way we understand how the proportions of ingredients in cookies must change to maintain a state of “taste good” can help us to analyze any complex system such as heart disease. Instead of flour, butter, sugar, we have perhaps hundreds of clinical, laboratory, and multiomic (proteomic, genomic, metabolomic,…) variables on thousands of patients. The challenge is to go from this matrix of data to molecular mechanisms that underlie the disease. I’ll talk about how we use methods from topological data analysis, random walks on graphs, linear algebra, and text mining to answer the challenge for heart failure and myocardial infarction (heart attacks). This is joint work with Esha Datta, Aditya Ballal, and David Liem.