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
nice science reality
It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.
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.
reality understanding machines
By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.
evil premature root
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
achievement both complexity composing consistent emotional establish experience feeling master poetry prepare system
My feeling is that when we prepare a program, the experience can be just like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said, programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.
ideas two taste
Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.
years facts spending
In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the T E X project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.
years levels computer
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.
strong opportunity thinking
Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
science technology mathematics
A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
history algorithms granddaddy
[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.
kitchen important paper
The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
long
I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.