"Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don’t change or divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity." (Paul Auster,"The Music of Chance", 1990)
"It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity." (Fernando J Corbató, "On Building Systems That Will Fail", 1991)
"Model building is the art of selecting those aspects of a process that are relevant to the question being asked. As with any art, this selection is guided by taste, elegance, and metaphor; it is a matter of induction, rather than deduction. High science depends on this art." (John H Holland," Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity", 1995)
"Probably the most important reason that catastrophe theory received as much popular press as it did in the mid-1970s is not because of its unchallenged mathematical elegance, but because it appears to offer a coherent mathematical framework within which to talk about how discontinuous behaviors - stock market booms and busts or cellular differentiation, for instance - might emerge as the result of smooth changes in the inputs to a system, things like interest rates in a speculative market or the diffusion rate of chemicals in a developing embryo. These kinds of changes are often termed bifurcations, and playa central role in applied mathematical modeling. Catastrophe theory enables us to understand more clearly how - and why - they occur." (John L Casti, "Five Golden Rules", 1995)
"How beautifully simple is Wessel’s idea. Multiplying by √-1 is, geometrically, simply a rotation by 90 degrees in the counter clockwise sense [...] Because of this property √-1 is often said to be the rotation operator, in addition to being an imaginary number. As one historian of mathematics has observed, the elegance and sheer wonderful simplicity of this interpretation suggests 'that there is no occasion for anyone to muddle himself into a state of mystic wonderment over the grossly misnamed ‘imaginaries'. This is not to say, however, that this geometric interpretation wasn’t a huge leap forward in human understanding. Indeed, it is only the start of a tidal wave of elegant calculations." (Paul J Nahin, "An Imaginary Tale: The History of √-1", 1998)
"Mathematics is a product - a discovery - of the human mind. It enables us to see the incredible, simple, elegant, beautiful, ordered structure that lies beneath the universe we live in. It is one of the greatest creations of mankind - if it is not indeed the greatest." (Keith Devlin, "Life By the Numbers", 1998)
"Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure." (Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges", 1999)
"Even the most elegant and beautiful physical theory may disappear without a trace if not confirmed by experiment, while, as a rule, a theorem, once proved, remains in mathematics forever." (Michael I Monastyrsky, "Riemann, Topology, and Physics", 1999)
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