“Just as there are poets who will wrestle for months to get an insight down on paper in its most jewel-like form, because to them the truth of the poem is inseparable from its expression, so there are mathematicians who believe that, if a given proof is lengthy and messy, then, no matter how ironclad its logic, there must be a better proof—briefer, more elegant—waiting to be uncovered.”
—J.M. Coetzee in a review of the anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (pdf) that was recently published in, yes, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. (via Literary Saloon)
