One of my colleagues sent a report to our board that talked about an "elegant regulatory solution." A board member has questioned the word "elegant." It is often used this way in academic writing. I looked it up, and one definition was "simple, but powerful." That of course is what she meant.

However, used that way is it just an academic buzzword? The most common definition of "elegant," we all know, refers to that refined lady who always dresses tastefully.

Some respected authority in the cloudy recesses of my memory said "If it can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood."

If we can apply that reasoning to the present example, Kalleh, the most obvious recommended choice is "simple, but powerful" instead of the (possibly) ambiguous "elegant."

I wouldn't call it academic or a buzzword. It's a term common in mathematics, and in sciences like physics and computing especially where mathematical formalism is valued. Elegance is one of the most important standards by which an idea can be judged. It has to be right, but if it isn't elegant it's almost as if you haven't got it right yet: or at least, haven't understood properly, haven't discovered what's really going on. Nature should be simple at heart: proofs should be minimal and general.

This sense of 'elegant' should be understood, and not as a buzzword, by anyone with a mathematical bent to their training. Whether it can be applied outside certain fields is another matter: biology and economics possibly do not admit of elegant solutions.

Elegant would be fine to me. Far more understandable that some of the business and academic jargon that is all too prevalent these days, as a recent thread here will clearly show.

Aput, I think that elegance does apply to such fields as economics, and to most any other field. Kalleh, you've seen a bell curve distribution of results of a study, I'm sure. Wouldn't you call that "elegant?" The curve expresses simply but powerfully how the law of averages works. I'm far from being a scientist, but I think of the term as meaning simple, clear, and powerful more than fancy. "Graceful" might be a synonym for both meanings.

The bell-shaped curve may be graceful, but it's distinctly inelegant in some ways. The general equation for it is (and I doubt any of the useful symbols will show up here, so I have to make it even more ungainly):

P(x) = 1/sigma.sqrt(2.pi) . e^-(x-mu)^2/2.sigma^2

for mean mu and standard deviation sigma.

What's really inelegant is that that has no integral in terms of algebraic functions, so the cumulative probability has to be calculated by brute force and put in a look-up table.

However, what is elegant is the Central Limit Theorem: the fact that the sum of any variables with any finite distribution, even if not themselves normal, tends to the normal distribution. So the bell-shaped curve works as an approximation for multiple samples where it doesn't work individually. That's very useful and captures a huge generalization. And that's what I'd therefore call elegant.

Thanks for this excellent analysis of the word "elegance." In fact, I copied parts of aput's explanation to the particular board member who asked the question.

I do think it can be applied to a regulatory solution because the solution needs to be simple enough so that it can be accomplished by all the nursing boards, and yet it needs to encompass a multitude of variables.

quote:

Some respected authority in the cloudy recesses of my memory said "If it can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood."

That sounds like the law traditionally attributed to Major Edward A. Murphy, Jr.