Featured
Today
Browse
Authors
Topics

Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, is a renowned computer scientist and winner of the 1974 Turing Award.

Sourced

  • Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
    • Donald Knuth's webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)

  • I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level.

  • The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

  • The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.

  • The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.
    • Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22 (April 1996)

  • Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
    • Foreword to the book A=B (1996)

  • A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
    • Digital Typography, ch. 1, p. 8 (1999)

  • I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
    • Digital Typography, ch. 33, p. 649 (1999)

  • I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.

  • Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

The Art of Computer Programming (1968-2005)

  • An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
    • Vol. I, Fundamental Algorithms, Section 1.1 (1968)

  • The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
    • Vol. II, Seminumerical Algorithms, Section 3.3.2 part B, first paragraph (1969)

  • The reason is not to glorify "bit chasing"; a more fundamental issue is at stake here: Numerical subroutines should deliver results that satisfy simple, useful mathematical laws whenever possible. [...] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
    • Vol. II, Seminumerical Algorithms, Section 4.2.2 part A, final paragraph [Italics in source]

  • Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.
    • Vol. III, Sorting and Searching, End of index (1973)

Computer Programming as an Art (1974)

1974 Turing Award Lecturehttp://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf, Communications of the ACM 17 (12), (December 1974), pp. 667–673
  • Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
    • p. 668

  • We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
    • p. 669 [italics in source]

  • Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

  • Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
    • p. 673

Quotes about

 
Quoternity
SilverdaleInteractive.com © 2024. All rights reserved.