My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it’s easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.
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.
Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...
A mathematical formula should never be “owned” by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don’t fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.
My first program taught me a lot about the errors that I was going to be making in the future, and also about how to find errors. That’s sort of the story of my life, making errors and trying to recover from them. I try to get things correct. I probably obsess about not making too many mistakes.
I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one’s contributions to computer science.
God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
I’m obsessively detail-oriented.
There’s ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
I’ve never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.
Instead of concentrating just on finding good answers to questions, it’s more important to learn how to find good questions!
Overstimulation has been the real drawback. I need to find ways to stop thinking about analysis of algorithms, in order to do various other things that human beings ought to do.
The language in which we express our ideas has a strong influence on our thought processes.
A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.