The concept of beauty has suffered a long and painful tactical retreat in the arts, where it is often seen as a naive sentiment of the past, irrelevant for the complexities of today. As a threatened species it seems to have found a refuge in the world of mathematics. There, behind the high walls of academia, it lives a life free of irony, universally admired as a force of creative power, either as a prescient guide to the truth or as a treacherous seducer. There is a long line of famous mathematicians and physicists who have expressed strong views about the role of beauty in science. When the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey was founded in 1930, its director Abraham Flexner chose as its motto 'Truth and Beauty'. When one of its first faculty members, the mathematician Hermann WeyL, was asked which of these two values he preferred, his answer was: 'My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.'1 The English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, went a step even further when he said: 'It is more important for our equations to be beautiful than to have them fit experiment.'
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