Donald Knuth Doesn't Use Email

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. 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. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest th...

 Donald Knuth on Getting to the Source Material

Seibel: Do you feel like programmers and computer scientists are aware enough of the history of our field? It is, after all, a pretty short history. Knuth: There aren't too many that are scholars. Even when I started writing my books in 1963, I didn't think people knew what had happened In 1959. I was reading in American Scientist last week about people who had rediscovered an algorithm that Boyer and Moore had discovered in 1980. Ii happens all the time that people don't realize the glorio...

 Donald Knuth on Complexity in Computer Science

In other words, there's still so much more beyond any five pages of my book that you can make a lifetime's worth of study, because there's just that much In computer science. Computer science doesn't all boil down to a bunch of simple things. If it turned out that computer science was very simple, that all you needed to do was find the right 50 things and then learn them really well, then I would say, "OK, everybody in the world should know those 50 things and know them thoroughly." But It ...