"When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." — Richard Buckminster Fuller
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I learned this from Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in his book Let My People Go Surfing.
Buckminster Fuller, the architect and systems thinker behind the geodesic dome, never chased elegance for its own sake.
He focused entirely on solving the problem. But he treated beauty as a diagnostic. If the finished solution felt clunky, something was still wrong.
Why would beauty signal correctness? One reason is Occam's razor. Between two competing explanations, the simpler one is preferred. A beautiful solution oftentimes strips away unnecessary complexity and captures only what matters. The clutter is gone, and what remains feels inevitable.
This also reminds me of what David Hilbert said about the importance of scientific work:
"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."