Complexity Reduction Quotes

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

He [John von Neumann] had the invaluable faculty of being able to take the most difficult problem and separate it into its components, whereupon everything looked brlliantly simple.

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

Keeping it simple for the consumer is incredibly dire.

Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.

I've spent my life trying to make things simpler.

If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

Make everything as simple as possible but not simpler.

People tend to simplify things.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ''Seek simplicity and distrust it.''

Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you're not aware really of the solution.

In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.

If we start to dumb down what has been made clear, where does that stop?

With technological advances, there's a very natural curve between cost and complexity and adoption. When the cost and complexity are high, the adoption rate is - let's call it 'modest.'

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

Divide each difficulty at hand into as many pieces as possible and as could be required to better solve them.

Simplicity is really hard.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.