Elegant Model
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
An Elegant Model is a system model that ...
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Verbal Representation, Diagrammatic Representation.
References
2015
- http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-is-elegance-in-science
- QUOTE: a thousand people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, whom I polled in hopes that the opposite of elegance could, like the weight of an ox, be determined in aggregate, responded with “trashy,” “crude,” “clumsy,” “awkward,” “cumbersome,” and “uncoördinated.”
According to a 2010 paper in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, “When a theory or a model explains a phenomenon clearly, directly and economically, we say it is elegant: one idea, easy to understand, can account for a large amount of data and answer many questions.” This definition — simplicity plus capaciousness — seems right. Goodman told me that, to her, Newton’s second law of motion, F = ma, which relates force with mass and acceleration, is one of the most elegant findings in science.
- QUOTE: a thousand people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, whom I polled in hopes that the opposite of elegance could, like the weight of an ox, be determined in aggregate, responded with “trashy,” “crude,” “clumsy,” “awkward,” “cumbersome,” and “uncoördinated.”