Donald Ervin Knuth (born 10 January 1938) is an American computer scientist, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, and winner of the 1974 Turing Award.
Born: January 10th, 1938
Categories: American technology writers, Americans, Computer scientists, Educators, Living people
Quotes: 27 sourced quotes total (includes 1 about)
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An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...
How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.
By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.
In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
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 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.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
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.
In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.
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.
For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.
The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
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.
If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.
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.
To summarize: We have seen that 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. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art.