On Abstraction, Abstractly Considered

 

Arriving in California at the age of twenty… I had no idea of what direction to pursue.  I was initially inclined toward operator algebra, one of the more abstract areas of algebra, owing to my vauge sense that  the more abstract a theory was, the better.

-- Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. 35

[Update to this essay:
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-vulgar-numbers.html ]