Elegant Solution Quotes

To every problem, there is a most simple solution.

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop... But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

Genius: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other's designs, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.

No solution can be more elegant than the problem at which it is aimed allows.

The key is that when we disagree, we really hear the other one out and agree that there is a more elegant solution than one of us 'winning.'

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.

We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable, that leave you with the sense that that's the only possible solution that makes sense.

There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.

It is my opinion that everything must be based on a simple idea. And it is my opinion that this idea, once we have finally discovered it, will be so compelling, so beautiful, that we will say to one another, yes, how could it have been any different.

Simplicity of approach is always best.

You have to have the will not to jump at the first solution, because the really elegant solution might be right around the corner.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

I'm a mechanical engineer, and I grew up on a farm, so I like practical hardware - somebody's elegant solution that proves itself over the long term.

Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

No matter how complicated a problem is, it usually can be reduced to a simple, comprehensible form which is often the best solution.

The essence of profound insight is simplicity.