American Computer Scientist Quotes

Donald Knuth

Dennis Ritchie

Larry Page

Grace Hopper

Vint Cerf

Randy Pausch

Fred Brooks

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

The fact is, when you look at the best teams—like the ones that existed at Toyota or 3M when Takeuchi or Nonaka wrote their paper, or the ones at Google or Salesforce.com or Amazon today—there isn't this separation of roles.

Jeff Sutherland

The more technological a society is, the greater the security gap is.

I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought.

The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. […] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a higher level of abstraction.

Among the formal graphical methods are Frege's (1879) Begriffsschrift, Peirce's (1909) existential graphs, and Sowa's (1984) conceptual graphs. These three are based in first-order predicate logic.

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language. It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds.

If I was able to tell my story with the passion I felt, my lecture might help others find a path to fulfilling their own dreams.

Computer-aided design is not automatic design, although it must include many automatic design features. By automatic design we mean design procedures which are capable of being completely specified in a form which a computer can execute without human intervention.

Douglas T. Ross

If you look at things like Google Now also. Maybe you want to just have [a question] answered for you before you ask it.

This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around.

A pattern is a fully realized form original, or model accepted or proposed for imitation. With patterns, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor.

It is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him.

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance. Evidence for the worldwide fascination with computers is everywhere, from the articles on the financial, and even the front pages of the newspapers, to the difficulties that even the most prestigious universities experience in finding and keeping faculty in computer science. The best professors, instead of teaching bright students, join start-up companies.

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

I love cosmology: there's something uplifting about viewing the entire universe as a single object with a certain shape. What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of man's attention than the cosmos itself? Forget about interest rates, forget about war and murder, let's talk about space.

Constructs extraneous to the real world should be eliminated from the analysis model. They may be needed later during design, but not now. For example, CPU subroutine, process, algorithm, and interrupt are implementation constructs for most applications [and should be excluded from the analysis model]...

What you don't want is a product to be cool. You want it to be a part of people's everyday life.

In a world filled with violence, hatred, and suspicion, giving is an expression of faith, trust, and concern.

Douglas A. Lawson