Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuthis an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth10 January 1938
CountryUnited States of America
Donald Knuth quotes about
may facts helping
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
names important statistics
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.
successful ingredients essentials
The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
funny-inspirational bugs computer
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
memories jewels ubuntu
I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.
teamwork strong team-building
A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
book writing learning
...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.
roots evil debugging
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
book exercise important
The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."
facts want fields
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.
change attitude learning
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.
running thinking two
TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler
practice inspired theory
The best theory is inspired by practice.
art wall reality
People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones.