Formal elegance

The harmonious arrangement of elements such that the mind can without effort take in the whole without neglecting the details. This may be taken as indicating the nature of all elegance, whether aesthetic, theoretical, or functional. In a universal theory elegance implies the highest self-consistency and simplicity with all phenomena, large and small, complex and elementary, being revealed as expressions of one comprehensive principle. An elegant theory of organism, for example, must display the functional elegance of living systems whereby all their parts cooperate to maintain the properties of the whole. The special form which elegance takes in connection with sets of related constructs (hypotheses) is called invariance.