Grand unification of mathematics
by John from John D. Cook on (#34MD)
Greg Egan's short story Glory features a "xenomathematician" who discovers that an ancient civilization had produced a sort of grand unification of their various branches of mathematics.
It was not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a different guise. Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful mathematical system was rich enough to mirror in part - and sometimes in a complex and distorted fashion - every other sufficiently beautiful system. Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing proved to have been a waste of time, but everything was shown to be magnificently intertwined.