Donald Knuth

From Wikiquote

Donald Ervin Knuth (born 10 January 1938) is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.

Contents 1 Sourced 1.1 The Art of Computer Programming (1968-2005) 2 Unsourced 3 External links

[edit] Sourced

• Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
  • in "Computer Programming as an Art", Turing Award lecture (1974)

• 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.
  • Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview (1993)
    • On why bioinformatics is very exciting

• 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.
  • Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22 (April 1996)

• 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.
  • 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.”
  • Knuth, Donald (2002). "All Questions Answered". Notices of the AMS 49 (3): 321.

[edit] 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)

• 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)

[edit] Unsourced

• A list is only as strong as its weakest link.

• In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

• The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.
  • On the biggest challenge facing programmers today

• The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

[edit] External links