All Fact is Beautiful Theory: The Romantic Philip Selznick

All Games Bright and Beautiful

What is a combinatorial game? The usual definition is a game in which (i) there are two players moving alternately; (ii) there are no chance devices and both players have perfect information; (iii) the rules are such that the game must eventually end; and (iv) there are no draws, and the winner is determined by who moves last. In this section, two master expositors lead us through many examples...

Romantic Theory

The invitation to participate in the seminar on Theory was simultaneously pleasing and puzzling: I was pleased to be paired with Tilottama Rajan, towards whose work I am intellectually sympathetic, but puzzled by the rubric under which I was asked to articulate the relation of my Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol to her Dark Interpreter. My only contributions to what is conventionally understood...

Romantic Political Theory

It is now a decade since the passing of Isaiah Berlin. In these ten years his industrious editor, Henry Hardy, has collected and published Berlin’s essays and a volume of letters and prepared for publication three of Berlin’s lecture series. These lecture series have been published as The Roots of Romanticism, Freedom and Its Betrayal, and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. Although published...

What is beautiful is usable

An experiment was conducted to test the relationships between users' perceptions of a computerized system's beauty and usability. The experiment used a computerized application as a surrogate for an Automated Teller Machine (ATM). Perceptions were elicited before and after the participants used the system. Pre-experimental measures indicate strong correlations between system's perceived aesthet...

Beautiful conjectures in graph theory