What's beautiful in CS?
As others have said, this is very opinion based. What's the difference between &quot;cool&quot; and &quot;beautiful&quot;? I find the Curry-Howard isomorphism beautiful, you don't. Neither of us is wrong.
Ultimately, Computer Science is a science of compromise. Mathematics is concerned with what &quot;is&quot;: logical facts, pure truth and knowledge. Computer Science is concerned with what can be computed, and thanks to undecidability, that's really not that much.
There are uncountably many undecidable sets, but only countably many decidable ones.
So the mathematicians get to write beautiful pictures and draw beautiful diagrams about what is, in the abstract. And the computer scientists get to find the heuristics, the edge cases, the conservative approximations, and the impossibility results. In some sense, ours is a science of ugliness.
That said, everyone will find something beautiful in their field. In mine (Programming Languages), there's a whole category of paper called &quot;Pearl&quot; papers, where the design of something complex is made particularly simple or elegant by the programming language or technique used to create it. If you google &quot;ICFP Functional Pearl&quot; or &quot;JFP Functional Pearl&quot; you'll find a ton.