# Infinity Category Theory Offers a Bird's-Eye View of Mathematics

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## Metadata
- Author: [[Emily Riehl]]
- Full Title: Infinity Category Theory Offers a Bird's-Eye View of Mathematics
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infinity-category-theory-offers-a-birds-eye-view-of-mathematics/

## Highlights
- simplification through abstraction. As Eugenia Cheng puts it in *The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, “*a powerful aspect of abstraction is that many different situations become the same when you forget some details.”
- World, “*a powerful aspect of abstraction is that many different situations become the same when you forget some details.”
- A paradoxical idea in mathematics is that of simplification through abstraction. As Eugenia Cheng puts it in *The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, “*a powerful aspect of abstraction is that many different situations become the same when you forget some details.”
- The perspective of “zooming out to infinity” offers a novel way to think about old concepts and a path toward the discovery of new ones.
    - Tags: [[infinity]] 
- A paradoxical idea in mathematics is that of simplification through abstraction.
- research advances in mathematics are often inspired by new and surprising analogies between previously unconnected areas.
- “The aim of theory really is, to a great extent, that of systematically organizing past experience in such a way that the next generation, our students and their students and so on will be able to absorb the essential aspects in as painless a way as possible, and this is the only way in which you can go on cumulatively building up any kind of scientific activity without eventually coming to a dead end.”