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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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Donald Knuth
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: January 10
Academic
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Historian Of Mathematics
Mathematician
Programmer
University Teacher
Writer
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Donald E. Knuth
Don Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth
D.E.K.
DEK
Knuth
Going
Long
Good
Things
Never
Take
More quotes by Donald Knuth
How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
Donald Knuth
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
Donald Knuth
I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
Donald Knuth
Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.
Donald Knuth
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
There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
Donald Knuth
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Donald Knuth
My first program taught me a lot about the errors that I was going to be making in the future, and also about how to find errors. That's sort of the story of my life, making errors and trying to recover from them. I try to get things correct. I probably obsess about not making too many mistakes.
Donald Knuth
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
Donald Knuth
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
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Donald Knuth
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Donald Knuth
The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
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
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
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
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