Linus is a hacker, not an academic, so there is no clean high-level abstraction of git; no <i>algebra of git</i>. OTOH, it is ridiculously fast and ridiculously useful (for Linus, and for anyone who goes to the trouble to understand its execution model).<p>I think there'd be a paper or two in attempting to infer an algebra of git. There wouldn't be a clean one, so you could propose modifications of git to facilitate a clean algebra, in the way that physicists and biologists hypothesize laws to explain the observed universe.