Taste for Makers

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