Peter Reintjes wrote a beautiful paper in 1992 titled Elegant Technologies (see http://zhurnaly.com/documents/ElegantTechnologies.pdf for *.PDF version). He talks about some characteristics of elegance:

• abstraction — derived from a few powerful principles
• simplicity — comprehensible at a systems level
• generality — applicable to a wide range of problems
• unboundedness — open to graceful evolution

The hallmark of elegance, in Reintjes's judgment, is that it contributes to complexity management — a key challenge in all significant human endeavors.

Friday, September 10, 1999 at 06:00:42 (EDT) = 1999-09-10

(see also MoreElegantTechnologies (8 Nov 2003), ... )

TopicThinking - TopicPhilosophy

Thanks to whoever wrote the glowing review. - Peter

... that was me (^z), as usual — and thank you, Peter, for the original essay!

(correlates: MoreElegantTechnologies, CoarseCorrection, Comments on RichFlammang, ...)