Donald Knuth
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.Collection: Academic
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.Collection: May
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Years
We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.Collection: Art
It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.Collection: Nice
The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.Collection: Running
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.Collection: Expression
For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: People
The best practice is inspired by theory.Collection: Best Practices
The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.Collection: Four
...methods are more important than facts. The educational value of a problem given to a student depends mostly on how often the thought processes that are invoked to solve it will be helpful in later situations. It has little to do with how useful the answer to the problem may be. On the other hand, a good problem must also motivate the students; they should be interested in seeing the answer. Since students differ so greatly, I cannot expect everyone to like the problems that please me.Collection: Educational
I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.Collection: Science
Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.Collection: Tree
The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."Collection: Book
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.Collection: Art
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.Collection: Digital
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.Collection: Order
... the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.Collection: Writing
...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.Collection: Book
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%Collection: Opportunity
These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.Collection: Thinking
I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universeCollection: Inspirational
How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.Collection: Numbers