The French Bourbaki school certainly had a large influence on increasing abstraction in math, with their rallying cry "Down With Triangles". The more fundamenta

The French Bourbaki school certainly had a large influence on increasing abstraction in math, with their rallying cry "Down With Triangles". The more fundamental reason is that generalizing a problem works; it distills the essence and allows machinery from other branches of math to help solve it. "A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies." -- Stefan Banach