13 October 2011

Donald Knuth on email

"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 that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study."
Alex Pang, who is writing a book on Contemplative Computing, has posted this lovely quote on Facebook, presumably from an interview with Donald Knuth; and a link to earlier comments on Knuth's (1990s) Stanford web pages.

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