Taste for Makers
Original excerpt
February 2002 "...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...." - Thomas Kuhn, _The Copernican Revolution_ "All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way." - Ben Rich, _Skunk Works_ "Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics." - G. H. Hardy, _A Mathematician's Apology_ I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I…
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This article by Paul Graham is part of the Paul Graham reading list on Burn 451, covering startups & essays.
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