68+ Donald Knuth Quotes On Education, Technology And Socialism

Donald Knuth is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is known for his fundamental contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Donald Knuth on life, education, technology.

Top 10 Donald Knuth Quotes

1. An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
2. Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
3. Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
4. 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.
5. Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
6. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
7. 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 eachother, like a wall of mini stones.
8. I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.
9. 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.
10. 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%

Donald Knuth Image Quotes

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. — Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth Short Quotes

• A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
• The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
• The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
• I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
• I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
• I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
• If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
• There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
• It is much more rewarding to do more with less.

Donald Knuth Quotes About Life

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

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

Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it. — 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 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

Donald Knuth Quotes About Computer

Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. — 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

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

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. — Donald Knuth

Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do. — Donald Knuth

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute. — 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

In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field. — 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

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

Donald Knuth Quotes About Science

It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there. — Donald Knuth

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. — Donald Knuth

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

We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art. — Donald Knuth

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science. — Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth Quotes About Programs

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language. — Donald Knuth

Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour. — 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

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

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 universe — Donald Knuth

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. — Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth Famous Quotes And Sayings

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. — 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

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 most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located. — Donald Knuth

The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish. — 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

[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day. — Donald Knuth

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste. — Donald Knuth

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine. — 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

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. — Donald Knuth

How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world. — 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 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. — Donald Knuth

I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take. — Donald Knuth

The best theory is inspired by practice. — Donald Knuth

God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue. — Donald Knuth

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. 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%. — 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

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

AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder. — 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

Life Lessons by Donald Knuth

1. Donald Knuth's work emphasizes the importance of taking the time to understand the fundamentals of a problem before attempting to solve it.
2. His work also stresses the importance of writing clear and concise code that is easy to maintain and debug.
3. Finally, Knuth's work highlights the value of continual learning and improvement, as he has continually updated his books and algorithms over the years.