A Grumpy Assessment to the Most Beautiful Equation (2011)

Before I get any criticisms, if any, I'd like to explain a little bit about why I wrote this past at that time.

Quora, among other places, is rife with people who spout the same-old same-old about various topics.

"What's the most beautiful equation?" And you get this at the very top. "What's the most amazing piece of code?" And you get that unreadable inverse square root hack.

The goal of the post was to have the reader question what they think is beautiful and why. I, too, thought that equation was beautiful, but it was beautiful until I wrote it in Lisp:

    > (1+ (exp (complex 0 pi)))
    #C(0.0d0 1.2246467991473532d-16)

It was not at all because Lisp is ugly. (I find it—Lisp—quite elegant myself!) Rather, it was because equivalent non-contrived syntactic transformations of the equation made it lose its appeal, and made me realize its only appeal is purely visually aesthetic.

I also knew, but it had not really sunk in, that, in pseudo-Lisp notation,

    e^(i*t) = #C(cos t, sin t)

is just a rotation, identical to the rectangular point representation

    (cos t, sin t)

as I explain in the post.