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Donald Knuth
33 quotes
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview (1993)
“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.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22 (April 1996)
“The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword to the book A=B (1996)
“A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Digital Typography, ch. 1, p. 8 (1999)
“I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Donald Knuth, quoted in: Arturo Gonzalez-Gutierrez (2007) Minimum-length Corridors: Complexity and Approximations. p. 99
“In a way, you'd say my life is a convex combination of English and mathematics. ... And not only that, I want my kids to be that way: use left brain, right brain at the same time – you got a lot more done. That was part of the bargain.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am assuming that God exists and I am glad that there is no way to prove this. [Because] I would run through the proof once, and then I'd forget it, and I would never speculate about spiritual things and mysteries otherwise. And, I think, my life would be very incomplete.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I came to philosophy finally phrased as "0.8 is enough". … If I had a way to rate happiness, I think it's a good design to have an organism that's happy about 80% of the time. If it was 100% of the time, it would be like everybody's on drugs and everything collapses and nothing works because everybody is just too happy. … There are times when I am down and I know that I've actually been programmed to be depressed a certain amount of time.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's face it, if there were 10 people like me in the world, we wouldn't have time to read each other's books.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most people only know pi in decimal.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1938) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol. I, preface (October 1967) to the first edition. (p. x 1973, p. ix 1997)
“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol. I, Fundamental Algorithms, Section 1.1 (1968)
“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 (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1938) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol. II, Seminumerical Algorithms, Section 3.3.2 part B, first paragraph (1969)
“The reason is not to glorify "bit chasing"; a more fundamental issue is at stake here: Numerical subroutines should deliver results that satisfy simple, useful mathematical laws whenever possible. [...] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol. III, Sorting and Searching, End of index (1973)
“Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol. IV - A, Combinatorial Algorithms, Section 4.2.1.6 (2011)
“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 (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1938) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Variant in Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements". Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1.
“To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art.”
Donald Knuth (born 1938) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1938) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Literate Programming", The Computer Journal 27 (1984), p. 97. (Reprinted in Literate Programming, 1992, p. 99.)