| At the extreme end of this you get category theory, with Mathematicians affectionately refer to as "abstract nonsense". I checked the homepage of nLab and found this description [0]: > This is a wiki for collaborative work on Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy — especially, but far from exclusively, from the n-point of view: with a sympathy towards the tools and perspective of higher algebra, homotopy theory, type theory, category theory and higher category theory. And following to the description of n-point of view: > In particular, the nLab has a particular point of view, which we may call the nPOV, the higher algebraic, homotopical, or n- categorical point of view. So, nLab seems to have made a very deliberate choice to cater to the style you are talking about. I think your complaint is more valid for Wikipedia, which seems to want to be more general purpose. However it is not specific to math. Most articles on Wikipedia have a tendency to assume a high level of subject knowledge on the part of the reader. The math community is well aware of the pedagogical concerns. You don't see category theory until grad school, where it is taught with the assumption that you are well versed in many concrete instances of categories. You don't even see abstract algebra until the later mart of a undergrad math major. Again, it is taught with the assumption that you are already well versed in several concrete instances of the algebraic structures. If you get a math textbook, you will find that they almost never take the most generic approach; and instead tend to take the most concrete approach that would cover the subject matter. [0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage |