Donald Knuth Quotes

Most people only know pi in decimal.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

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.