Building a universe one brick at a time, on a foundation of indisputable facts, Knuth is the methodological successor of Euclid and Aquinas.
Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
231–240 of 357 posts
Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#232A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Knuth in his home, my wife was doing some photography for him. He took me to his room and showed me his setup, he was researching Soduku algorithms at the time. His hands were blisteringly quick, moving between EMacs panes, triggering evaluations and printing of results, as fast as any 20 year old. In his 80s , he hasn’t seemed to suffer any mental decline. I started talk…
> moving between EMacs panes Well, the editor wars are over folks. More seriously, Don Knuth is a treasure. One of the coolest things about computing science is how all the greats in the field are either alive, or within the living memory of people who are.
learning that Knuth uses Emacs has been my proudest moment as an Emacs user.
Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#233Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#234Can someone write a volume 0 or volume -1 or some guide so noobs like me who want to enter this treasure chest can do so. I got lost just trying to start this so it might be over my head. I know Python, rusty on Java and cpp never touched assembly.
That would be "the hobbit" ? :)
Omg that would be awesome if he named it that.
Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#235Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re interested in reading them (and they are extremely readable), you should first know something (not everything) about programming and discrete mathematics. If you watched some YouTube videos on logic, sets, graphs, etc. you’ll be more than equipped. Knuth has even written a book, Concrete Mathematics, that covers these pre-requisites but it might be faster and easier to watch a Khan Academy video!
That's not really what Concrete Mathematics is about. It's not a prereq to TAOCP.
Mathematical Induction in volume 1 is the prerequisite material. The work is supposed to be self-sufficient.
Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> moving between EMacs panes Well, the editor wars are over folks. More seriously, Don Knuth is a treasure. One of the coolest things about computing science is how all the greats in the field are either alive, or within the living memory of people who are.
These are the photos my wife took at his home. https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... Like the 5th picture down you can see him standing (he uses a standing desk!) and if you blow up the screen, you can see part of an emacs window on the left hand side. I believe he also was using emacs shell windows as well, but not 100% sure. Direct Link: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2020/0…
Look how he use only a single screen and has this extraordinary device nobody uses anymore left of his screen but proves to be one of the best tool to dig deep into code.
Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#238Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read these the first time so far back that the extensive section (with the fold out pages) covering sorting on external tape drives was of interest to me. Over the intervening years I've gone back to these books many times to check on my understanding of subjects. (I've also bought and used all of his other books too: TeX, Concrete Mathematics, and other collected works.) I worked as an OS Architect at IBM and then…
I think #1 and #3 of these make a particularly good combination; they have very different and quite complementary merits. CLRS is rigorous and precise and analytical and theoretical. Skiena is handwavy and pragmatic and not always quite correct. CLRS is written for people who will be implementing complicated algorithms. Skiena is written for people who will be using other people's implementations. CLRS is deep. Skien…
Just to throw in some praise for Sedgewick's books: the diagrams are so gorgeous that even Edward Tufte cites them for their beauty and utility.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
Ctrl-f "Sedgewick".
Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
#240Can someone honestly tell me if they have actually read these books AND found them useful ON TGE JOB? What do you guys do for work? I tried reading part 1?? Like ten years ago and it was pretty much assembly language or something I believe. And gave up since it wasnt something that I needed in academia back then and there were far better ways to learn DSA
TAOCP was invaluable for a couple of jobs I had. One job involved indexing arbitrarily large books (gigabyte+ was not uncommon) on an embedded CPU with less than 1MB of RAM available to the indexer (this is 15+ years ago, before smart phones). It also involved searching hundreds of those books in a few seconds with ~8MB of RAM available. Indexing was taking place on a single core CPU while the user was using the devi…
How on earth do you even find work like this?
I would love to have a career working on problems like this but can't imagine how I'd get a job doing anything but commonplace back-end work.