A very little reflection is enough to expose the absurdity of the ‘literary superstition’. There are masses of chess-players in every civilized country—in Russia, almost the whole educated population; and every chess-player can recognize and appreciate a ‘beautiful’ game or problem. Yet a chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics (a game not entirely, since psychology also plays a part), and everyone who calls a problem ‘beautiful’ is applauding mathematical beauty, even if it is beauty of a comparatively lowly kind. Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology, loc. 172