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The Messiah Of Zooming Out

13 Mar 2023

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The Messiah Of Zooming Out. On Alexander Grothendieck, a mathematician who saw more than most:

the philosophy was this: If a phenomenon seems hard to explain, it’s because you haven’t fully understood how general it is. Once you figure out how general it is, the explanation will stare you in the face.

and

his commitment to the principle that all problems become easy if only you can find the right generalizations. Another, as we’ve also seen, is his willingness to redefine classical objects like points and curves in order to make them more susceptible to being generalized. The third, which is equally central, is Grothendieck’s lifelong insistence that mathematical objects are intrinsically uninteresting — instead it’s the relations between mathematical objects that matter. The internal structure of a line or a circle is boring; the fact that you can wrap a line around a circle is fundamental.

Anthologies: Betterment, Somatic Architecture, Thought Architecture, On the Nature of Things, Great Thinkers

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