Prime Abstractions¶
This section is the complete catalog of all 1,525 prime abstractions in the encyclopedia.
Use the Browse options below to move through the catalog by hierarchy, ontology, domain, family, or learnability. The Display options provide interactive views of the same underlying catalog.
Browse¶
- Alphabetically — the complete A–Z list, with a concise description of every prime.
- By hierarchy — prime and domain-specific abstractions arranged by the typed parent–child relationships of the catalog's mixed directed-acyclic hierarchy. Every node carries a P/D type badge, sits under its primary parent, and retains secondary parents and mutual partners as crosslinks.
- By ontology — every prime placed in the canonical category-and-sub-category tree. Best for understanding how the primes are conceptually organized.
- By domain group — primes and domain-specific abstractions grouped by the eight broad families the canonical domains roll up into (Formal Sciences, Natural Sciences, Humanities, …). The coarsest view, and the one place both layers are counted side by side.
- By domain — primes grouped by the intellectual tradition they originate from (Mathematics, Physics, Psychology & Behavioral Sciences, …). Each domain page also lists primes that draw from it as a secondary origin.
- By family — primes grouped by their neighborhood in abstraction space (k-means clusters over structural-signature embeddings), each with a short description. This is the empirical 'which primes sit near each other' view, distinct from the curated category/ontology trees.
- By learnability — primes sequenced as a curriculum, easiest first, with the catalog's prerequisite hierarchy honored. Five tiers; a reading-level toggle (ELI5 / ELI10 / ELI15 / ELI18 / Specialist) swaps every prime's explanation to your chosen level. Best for teachers, curriculum builders, or anyone approaching the catalog as a learner. See the methodology paper for how the tiering was built.
Display¶
- Atlas — an interactive, zoomable map of prime and domain-specific abstractions. Related concepts form territories and continents; moving closer reveals individual abstractions and their typed relationships.
- Shape of the Abstraction Space — the corpus from above: every canonical origin domain as one measured similarity map — bubble area = entities, distance = structural-signature similarity, regions = the eight canonical domain groups — with the full domain-distance matrix and the raw abstraction cloud beneath it.
- Cross-Domain Echoes — paired visual explanations of a shared pattern in two domains, showing which roles correspond and where the comparison stops.
- Tensions in Practice — interactive illustrations of competing aims, showing what different arrangements protect, cost, and leave unresolved.
- Sunburst — the same mixed single-parent hierarchy rendered as an interactive, zoomable sunburst diagram. Foundational abstractions ring the centre; node tooltips and focus links identify Prime or Domain-specific.
- Force graph — the full mixed directed-acyclic hierarchy as an interactive force-directed network. Where the Sunburst and By-hierarchy views keep one parent per abstraction, this view shows every logical typed relation, including domain → prime and domain → domain topology.