Encyclopedia of Abstractions¶
A catalog of 1,402 prime abstractions — recurring patterns of thought that show up across at least three domains of human knowledge — and 1,108 solution archetypes — the recurring shapes of intervention people reach for when those patterns appear.
Patterns like feedback, equilibrium, hierarchy, sovereignty, recursion, due process, and trade-off are not metaphors that move loosely between fields. They are the same structural shape recurring with different vocabulary in physics, biology, law, economics, software, and everywhere else. The Encyclopedia names each pattern carefully, sketches where it works and where it doesn't, and links it to the others nearby.
Who it's for¶
Curious readers crossing into unfamiliar fields, educators building curricula, researchers and practitioners working across disciplines, and anyone who finds the structural kinship between, say, a thermostat and a financial market — or a clinician's differential diagnosis and a debugger's stack trace — genuinely interesting.
Abstractopedia is a living, experimental catalog. Entries, counts, hierarchy edges, and methodology pages are under active revision. The project is published for inspection and use, not as a settled canon.
Browse the catalog¶
- Alphabetically — the A–Z list of every prime, each with a one-line summary
- By hierarchy — the directed-acyclic structure of typed parent–child relationships
- By ontology — the canonical category-and-sub-category tree
- By domain — primes grouped by the intellectual tradition they originate from
- By family — primes grouped by their neighborhood in abstraction space (k-means clusters)
- By learnability — primes sequenced as a curriculum, easiest first, with a reading-level toggle (ELI5 → Specialist)
Go deeper¶
- Solution Archetypes — the catalog of recurring intervention shapes, with components, mechanisms, and the prime abstractions each is anchored on
- Conceptual essays — long-form essays on prime structure, transfer, learnability, and the rest of the framework
- About this project — what the Encyclopedia is and isn't, the role of large language models in its construction, and the author's perspective on the experiment
Learning experiment¶
A hands-on companion to the catalog — an early, experimental web app that turns these patterns from something you read into a skill you practise.
More on what it is and why it's built this way: Abstractopia in Applications.
Next → Introduction