Donald Knuth Quotes

• I’m obsessively detail-oriented.

  Donald Knuth

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• Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.

  Donald Knuth

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• 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.

  Donald Knuth

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• I’ve never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.

  Donald Knuth

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• My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

  Donald Knuth

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• 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

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• There’s ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.

  Donald Knuth

• 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.

  Donald Knuth

• The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

  Donald Knuth

• The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

  Donald Knuth

• 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.

  Donald Knuth

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

  Donald Knuth

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• 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 eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

  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

• 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.

  Donald Knuth

• If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

  Donald Knuth

• I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one’s contributions to computer science.

  Donald Knuth

• God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.

  Donald Knuth

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

  Donald Knuth

• An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

  Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth (21)

Birth:	10th January, 1938
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Computer Scientist, Mathematician, Professor, Programmer, Writer

About

Donald Ervin Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US. He is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. He has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms". He received his bachelor of science degree in 1960. In 1963, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. As a writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB and CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MIX/MMIX instruction set architectures.

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