Donald Knuth Quotes

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.

In science, if the last 50 years were the age of physics, the next 50 years will be the age of biology.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.

For years, computer scientists were treating operating systems design as sort of an open-reserch issue, when the field's direction had been decided by commercial operations. Computer science has become completely cut off from reality.

Abel has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

A 70-year-old who takes good care of herself can have the biology of a 40-year-old. Conversely, a hard-living 30-year-old who has been inattentive to his health and well-being may have the biology of a man many years older.

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.

There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.

There is another domain that we consider relevant and having good prospects - marine biology. For many years this region [Russian Far East] has been home for one of the leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marine Biology.

I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

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.

It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

Finally one should add that in spite of the great complexity of protein synthesis and in spite of the considerable technical difficulties in synthesizing polynucleotides with defined sequences it is not unreasonable to hope that all these points will be clarified in the near future, and that the genetic code will be completely established on a sound experimental basis within a few years.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.