Donald Knuth

1938– · American computer scientist and mathematician (born 1938)

Topics: programming, software engineering, software design, open source

• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

  — Donald Knuth

• 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.

  — Donald Knuth

• 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.

  — Donald Knuth

• A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times.

  — Donald Knuth

• These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

  — Donald Knuth

• Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...

  — Donald Knuth

• Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

  — Donald Knuth

• I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

  — Donald Knuth

• In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

  — Donald Knuth

• The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

  — Donald Knuth

• Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random

  — Donald Knuth

• I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

  — Donald Knuth

• 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.

  — Donald Knuth

• 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.

  — Donald Knuth

• By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

  — Donald Knuth

• 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.

  — Donald Knuth

• 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.

  — Donald Knuth

• Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

  — Donald Knuth

• Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

  — Donald Knuth

• A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

  — Donald Knuth