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“You can never get enough generality. The more general solution the better. The solution to existence is the most general solution of all, the solution least infected by particularity. That is its defining quality. The entire way of thinking mathematically – in terms of simplicity, generality, tautology, elegance, beauty, stability, the eternal, the necessary, coherence, the analytic, the a priori – is totally different from the way a scientist thinks, which is always mired in particularity, inelegance, ugliness, the temporal, the contingent, the ad hoc, the arbitrary, the heuristic, the speculative; in Feynman’s crude guessing game.” — Thomas Stark
You can never get enough generality. The more general solution the better. The solution to existence is the most general solution of all, the solution least infected by particularity. That is its defining quality. The entire way of thinking mathematically – in terms of simplicity, generality, tautology, elegance, beauty, stability, the eternal, the necessary, coherence, the analytic, the a priori – is totally different from the way a scientist thinks, which is always mired in particularity, inelegance, ugliness, the temporal, the contingent, the ad hoc, the arbitrary, the heuristic, the speculative; in Feynman’s crude guessing game.