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"The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics."
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"Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony."
"Elegance is a glowing inner peace. Grace is an ability to give as well as to receive and be thankful. Mystery is a hidden laugh always ready to surface! Glamour only radiates if there is a sublime courage & bravery within: glamour is like the moon, it only shines because the sun is there."
"We must never confuse elegance with snobbery."
"If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!"
"What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?"
Explore more quotes by Edsger Dijkstra
"I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection."
"Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it."
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague."
"The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings."
"Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure."
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges."
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