Its proofs would be intuitive and elegant. They would be, in the words of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, proofs straight from the Book. Erdős imagined that God kept a book with all the best proofs in it. Saying that a proof was straight from the Book was the highest possible praise. It meant that the proof revealed why a theorem was true and didn’t merely bludgeon the reader into accepting it with some ugly, difficult argument.
