So I had the privilege of seeing Donald Knuth speak at UBC a few days ago. I was excited to see one of the eccentric Computing Science legends in real life.
The talk was in an interesting format. Knuth was in front of a relatively small theater, and simply answered any questions that were presented to him from the crowd. It was thus a spread of different questions and topics presented to him.
I took a few notes during the talk and I summarize the topics and Knuth’s responses here.
Knuth on writing:
- translate to have less jargon
- pays people to find errors in his books
- write to have errors, that is, be precise and falsifiable (e.g. “13% improvement”, where this 13% can be verified)
- have the history of discoveries with references
- write about things that will be important 50 years from now
- –> e.g. methods that are useful for many different applications
- –> e.g. data structures, satisfiability problems
Continue reading “Notes on a Conversation with Donald Knuth”