Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit | Hacker News Reader

Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit

catonmat.net

148 pointspkrumins44 comments

On a related note, I received a (regular, handwritten) mail from Donald Knuth today, in reply to an email in which I reported some (what I thought were) small errors in TAOCP (which turned out not to be errors afterall - so no reward check for me :).

I found one of his comments on my email funny. I started by saying "I am reading your book with great interest, at the same time hunting for small errors." He wrote next to it: "so why don't you start hunting for the big ones?". Inspiring on many levels :)

In the video that is found at the cited link, Knuth doesn't clearly say there that the incident didn't happen.

He says that he gets asked about this story and he met both Jobs and Gates only a few times and that in each case he was more impressed by them than they were of him.

The story is definitely false because Knuth is a very polite and modest person who has never been the sort of person that says "you're full of shit" to anyone.

More conclusively, another person in this thread pointed to the letter from Knuth in his own handwriting in which he says the Jobs story is untrue:

http://markharrison.net/stackoverflow/knuth/knuth-page2-enla...

> The story is definitely false because Knuth is a very polite and modest person who has never been the sort of person that says "you're full of shit" to anyone.

Absolutely. It's just a special case of the (likely) fact that Knuth never told anyone that they were full of shit.

I think great scientists and thinkers wouldn't tell another person that they're "full of shit", just in case they themselves are wrong. Scientists tend to be tolerant, sometimes to a fault, of differing views. Their training demands of it. And that's why we have that evolution vs pseudo-science thing today.

I think this might be overly optimistic. Really smart people can also have really large egos and no patience for common courtesy. When they're sure of something, they have no problem calling someone out on it.

Talented people tend to get misjudged a lot. Lots of scientists have big egos, but that can go a few was. A big ego can make you humble and accepting of others (if you reserve your harshest criticism for yourself) or a real prick.

Some people want to be liked, some people want to be respected, and some people just want to be left alone.

Not true. Richard Feynman would criticize academic presentations without mercy if he found them wrong.

Scientists can be just as emotional and biased as any other human being, regardless of training.

A story from meeting Donald Knuth. During the dotcom days, our startup team was sent to meet Donald Knuth for due diligence by some VC. Our startup was doing Location based stuff before it was cool. Our CTO went on and on about all the potential applications of location based services. Prof. Knuth cut him off in the middle and said, 'You would use all these services because you are part of the lunatic fringe'. :)

On a related note, I read somewhere that Godel was the only person Russell believed had read and understood "Principia Mathematica" besides the author themselves.

I believe this is mentioned in Logicomix.

Wow. I completely forgot about Logicomix: http://www.logicomix.com/ Never got round to reading them. I might just do so tomorrow :)

There's Whitehead, who co-authored "Principia Mathematica", and then there's Wittgenstein and Wiener, who offered a fairly thorough critique. Doubtful that they didn't understand it. I can't hunt down the exact quote right now, but AFAIK, when asked how many people have read and fully appreciated Principia, Russell's answer was "perhaps a dozen".

Are there any good examples of the critiques of Wittgenstein and Wiener of Principia Mathematica?

The Wikipedia article for PM only mentions Wittgenstein and separately a 'shortcut' from Wiener. I would like to know if there are longer writings somewhere.

I don't remember reading anything specific by Wiener, so that might have been from one of his talks or /Cybernetics/ or something, as for Wittgenstein, I'd look in the blue book. If it's important I can try and track down the references later. The point was, inscrutability of Principia is largely a myth. Sure, it is both nigh-unreadable and nobody actually uses the logical language developed therein, but it can be understood, it's simply not useful enough to compensate for verbosity. For a modern-day example, look at Coq. It is painfully verbose even after many iterations of refactoring.

I'm an armchair mathematician currently but I have high aspirations for my math career so it's not really important but if you have free time for definite references it would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the references so far. I'll look into Cybernetics. I already know of Coq but haven't looked that close, I'll make a note to investigate.

Semi-related tangent, this is Bertrand Russell on Wittgenstein from the epigraph of Markson's book Wittgenstein's Mistress:

"When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G.E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, 'I think very well of him indeed.' When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures."

I'm not even sure I get it. Is the joke supposed to be that Jobs isn't a real programmer, or that no one can get through Kunth's books?

The joke was that no one actually reads TAOCP. It was rumored that Knuth once described them as the "most purchased, least read" computer science books.

That rumor was also thoroughly debunked, here: http://markharrison.net/stackoverflow/knuth/

>The joke was that no one actually reads TAOCP.

While true, what surprised me is that Knuth's books are much more readable than you might expect from their reputation. TAOCP is a far cry from dry terse impenetrable tomes like Rudin.

I found that the introduction to MIX (MMIX in the latest editions) at the beginning was hard to get through. I pick up TAOCP as a reference once in a while, and I agree that later parts of it are much more readable.

Rudin's far from being a dry, terse, and impentrable tome. But maybe my standards are different.

The only Rudin book I've worked through is Real and Complex Analysis, and it is very dry indeed.

He also seems to favor some less intuitive proofs sometimes, which while correct and complete, leave the reader in the dark as to the intention behind it (the proof for the Lebesgue-Radon-Nikodym theorem given is an example of that.)

I think it's the sheer, awe-inspiring _quantity_ of high-level material that's hard to take. I've read parts of of TAOCP very deeply - implementing things, trying exercises, etc. and it is rewarding/exhausting. I doubt that I've worked through much more than 70-80 pages in this fashion from all of the books.

Given enough time, one could probably do this for the whole series to date, but I'd like to at least be working part-time before attempting it.

I never believed the story. It seemed out-of-character vulgar and hostile for Knuth.

I like Bruce Eckel's writing. It felt like my brain was actually working better. :-)

One further than this: every time --- every time --- I sit down with TAOCP, even on stuff I assume is going to be basic, I learn something awesome. It is one of the densest amounts of awesome per page of any book I've ever seen.

And I am very not crazy math guy, too.

The "XOR linked list" comes to mind.

Check out Volume 4.

Thanks, and there sayeth Knuth: "The web has thousands of tales that aren't true, about virtually everybody in public life. (Including the story about me and Pixar's CEO.)"

In fact, when Peter Sibel told Knuth during their interview that he was asking everyone if the had read TAOCP, Knuth said that even he hadn't read it.

I think the "joke" is supposed to be Jobs isn't really technical and is just a design guy. Its one of those stories that is used to "box" a person in and diminish them (happens in politics all the time). He knows more about electronics than quite a few commenters that repeat the story. Plus, I always saw it as an insult to Kunth, who always seems quite the gentleman.

No, the joke is that no human being is capable of reading Knuth tomes cover to cover. They are very dense, and cover some not-so-simple topics.

IMHO, neither. I have read it this way: Knuth thought that Jobs is insincere manipulator who tells people what they want to hear instead of just facts, and Knuth doesn't like that.

I, for one, would love to see you enlighten us about how you reached that colorful conclusion?

What exactly did you read to get there?

Pretty much how I read it though a bit overboard in characterization.

The story comes off to me as: Knuth calling Jobs out for flattery/embellishment. I bet everyone Steven Spielberg meets tells him he's their favorite director and they've seen all his movies. But if you look at the numbers for Empire of the Sun that just isn't possible.

I would tell Spielberg that I think Sidney Lumet was a better director.

I bet he'd take that gracefully, most people have both up in the top percentile.

I never believed it anyway, it didn't feel plausible at all.

ever the gentleman, he ducked the question.

Another one that people repeat is that Bill Gates said 640kb out to be enough for anybody. He says he never said it, but even if he did, at the time he supposedly made the statement, it was an accurate one given the technology available.

Steve Jobs don't know how to program probably. Once I've watched a video of Steve Woz on youtube saying he(Jobs) didn't knew a shit about making computers(hardware), but he is very talent at being the CEO or something like that. So it's very unlikely that he knows how to program.

I know that microsoft employees, including Bill Gates have read some Knuth, I've read that in a book of Bill Gates.

When Steve Jobs was 13, he called up Bob Hewlitt to ask for some spare parts for a frequency counter he was working on. He worked at HP, was a technician at Atari, and attended the Homebrew Computer Club. He does know about electronics, and it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to me that he might actually know a thing or two about programming as well.

He actually called Bill Hewlett [1], one of the founders of Hewlett and Packard [2].

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Reddington_Hewlett

You're right. Bill, not Bob. Thank you for the correction :)

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