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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, a significant portion of Knuth's lifetime work consists of digested summaries of original source materials.

One of the quotes seems to mention to that, where he says he digests a lot of papers to add a small part to TAoCP, since his aim is to write books that cover a the breadth of computer science (which necessarily cannot be as deep as these papers go).

The complaint is not the summarization, it is the lack of citation. I see no irony in this light.

I wasn't referring to the complaint, it was a reference to the output of Knuth not being particularly accessible if you don't like reading digested summaries, because a big part of what he set out to do is to summarize academic research across a wide range of topics.

I guess it's like rain on your weeding day.

(In his digestive summaries, Knuth does provide citations, to be clear)

I guess I don't understand why someone would make the contrary assumption about famous academic work.

For sure, also I don’t assume people know much about Knuth or expectations for academic work.

His citation lists at the back of each book are immense.

Synthesizing or summarizing? There is a difference.

Do you have quick summary of Knuth stating this? Just want to know, curious.

He has indeed said that, I can confirm that much. It should be easy to find in one in the interviews.

Yes it should be easy to find in 50+ hours of video content.

In addition to the other post in this thread mention that it's time consuming to go through the list.

Fundamentally, that work can be saved by the original author spend negligible amount of energy to provide the reference.

When I see people hiding information, or forgot to provide links, I am thinking a bit of human intellectual energy is wasted for no good reason...

He doesn’t have to state this. Look at his work.

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