Donald Knuth Quotes
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.
Knuth, Donald E. Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. CSLI Publications, 2001.
He is often called the “Father of Algebra” as the first person who actually wrote instructions for algebraic processes. At the time, Western mathematics was totally stagnant and intellectual development stifled by the Dark Ages and the Church.
He was one of the team that created the first Atomic Bomb. In 1946, the atomic bomb was known about by almost all Americans and almost no one had even heard of a computer or the concept of a computer. The British and Americans during the war had collaborated to build very limited electronic calculating machines but the concept of programs to control the calculating machines was new—initially created by van Neumann and Englishman Alan Turing. When he made this statement most people thought it was the ravings of a “mad scientist. He was one of the team that later developed the first real computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.”
Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".
