Donald Knuth Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at 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
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

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

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
It's the idea that counts true; but we need a name for the idea, so we can apply it more easily next time.

Donald Knuth
Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.

Donald Knuth
The difference between art and science is that science is what people understand well enough to explain to a computer. All else is art.

Donald Knuth
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.

Donald Knuth
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

Donald Knuth
I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

Donald Knuth
The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate all need for intelligent thought.

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

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

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
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
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
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
Always remember, however, that there's usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.

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