Donald Knuth

A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

— Donald Knuth

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

— Donald Knuth

I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.

— Donald Knuth

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

How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

— Donald Knuth

In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.

— Donald Knuth

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

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

A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times.

— Donald Knuth

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

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

— Donald Knuth

To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!

— Donald Knuth

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

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random

— Donald Knuth

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

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

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

— Donald Knuth

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...

— Donald Knuth

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

In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

— Donald Knuth

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

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

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

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

To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!

— Donald Knuth

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

— Donald Knuth

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

— 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

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

— Donald Knuth

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

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

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

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

— Donald Knuth

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

— Donald Knuth