Abstraction is about digging deep into a situation to find out what is at its core making it tick. Another way to think of it is about stripping away… - Eugenia Cheng

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Abstraction is about digging deep into a situation to find out what is at its core making it tick. Another way to think of it is about stripping away irrelevant details, or rather, stripping away details that are irrelevant to what we're thinking about now. These details might well be relevant to something else, but we decide we don't need to think about them for the time being. Crucially, it's a careful and controlled forgetting of details, not a slapdash ignoring of details out of laziness or a desire to skew an argument in a certain direction.

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About Eugenia Cheng

(born 1976 in , UK) is a British mathematician, educator and concert pianist. As a mathematician, her speciality is . She has written several books explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians and combatting .

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Alternative Names: Eugenia Loh-Gene Cheng • Eugenia L.G. Cheng
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... I wish we could educate people not just to be able to do things and know things, but to be nicer humans — and to get their self-esteem not from being better at something than someone else — but from how much they are able to help someone else do something.
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... The idea of math is to look for similarities between things so that you only need one "recipe" for many different situations. The key is that when you ignore some details, the situations become easier to understand and you can fill in the variables later. This is the process of abstraction.
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Infinity is a Loch Ness monster, capturing the imagination with its awe-inspiring size but elusive nature. Infinity is a dream, a vast fantasy world of endless time and space. Infinity is a dark forest with unexpected creatures, tangled thickets and sudden rays of light breaking through. Infinity is a loop that springs open to reveal an endless spiral.
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