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Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
--Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
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Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
--Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
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In dance or martial arts, elegance is minimum motion with maximum effect. In a mathematical proof or a computer program, elegance is the minimum number of steps to achieve the solution with maximum clarity. Engineers strive to use the least amount of material and minimize the number of moving parts; duct tape is not an elegant solution, except for taping ducts. Like an elegant theory, an elegant solution is recognized by its parsimony of definition and power of explanation. The most complex games have the fewest rules, as do the most dynamic societies.
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The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. --Blaise Pascal in Provincial Letters, 1656
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
--Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery
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Some people have an instinctive aversion to elegant theories; Reductionism is an epithet often heard. But simple fundamental truths in no way demean the resulting complex beauty. Once you have reduced a complex phenomenon to its essential truths, you can turn the analysis process around and synthesize something new, with informed creativity.
Elegant solutions are not arrived at directly in a single step, but typically evolve over many cycles of creative thought and critical judgment. Only in a free and open society are people free to innovate, free to voice their opinions, and free to choose.
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