Concept
Elegance
Overview
Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity.
Elegance is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness, particularly in visual design, decorative arts, literature, science, and the aesthetics of mathematics.
Elegant things often exhibit refined grace and suggest maturity, and in the case of mathematics, a deep mastery of the subject matter.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Elegance is discussed.
Mathematicians attach great importance to the elegance of their methods and their results. This is not pure dilettantism. What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
When any body is composed of parts smooth and polished, without pressing upon each other, without showing any ruggedness or confusion, and at the same time affecting some REGULAR SHAPE, I call it ELEGANT. It is closely allied to the beautiful, differing from it only in this REGULARITY; which, however, as it makes a very material difference in the affection produced, may very well constitute another species. Under…
Edmund Burke, Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
a chapter is titled for it
Much, owing to irrepressible instincts, which were better than avowed beliefs, has been moulded by an unconscious taste; but much also has been spoilt by false notions of what was fitting. The characteristic excellence of mathematics is only to be found where the reasoning is rigidly logical: the rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture. In the most beautiful work, a chain of…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
The beautiful formations in the kingdom of organised nature speak loudly for the realism of the aesthetical purposiveness of nature; since we might assume that behind the production of the beautiful there is an Idea of the beautiful in the producing cause, viz. a _purpose_ in respect of our Imagination. Flowers, blossoms, even the shapes of entire plants; the elegance of animal formations of all kinds, unneeded for…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
names the idea
In fact when beauty is maintained to be objective, it is not commonly meant that it exists as beauty out of relation to any mind whatsoever: but only that there is some standard of beauty valid for all minds. “It may, however, be said that beauty and other results commonly judged to be good, though we do not conceive them to exist out of relation to human beings (or at least minds of some kind), are yet so far…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
Philosophers who discussed Elegance
Related ideas
- Mathematics
- Literature
- Mathematical beauty
- Aesthetic taste
- Simplicity
- Science
- Theorem
- Occam's razor
- Philosophy of science
- Beauty
- Essence
- Chemistry
- Color
- Consistency
- Mathematical proof
- Design
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.