Comment by sdwr
11 hours ago
I remember a lot of pop sci being centered around "elegance", looking for simple models that are broadly predictive. Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Darwin. Feels like people are leaning the other way now, and seeing reality as messy, uncertain, and multifaceted.
A case study of myself as an overeager math student:
I used to focus so much on finding "elegant" proofs of things, especially geometric proofs. I'd construct elaborate diagrams to find an intuitive explanation, sometimes disregarding gaps in logic.
Then I gave up, and now I appreciate the brutal pragmatism of using Euler's formula for anything trigonometry-related. It's not a very elegant method, if accounting for the large quantity of rote intermediate work produced, but it's far more effective and straightforward for dealing with messy trig problems.