Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Knuth: All Questions Answered

Posted by timothy on from the art-of-computer dept.

sunhou writes: "The AMS published a lecture by Donald Knuth called All Questions Answered (pdf), where Knuth simply responded to questions from the audience. Topics ranged from errors in software ('I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"') to how he gets distracted by fonts on restaurant menus, to software patents. There were some really good questions (and responses)."

28 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. He needs to answer one more question by Akardam · · Score: 3, Funny

    101. What do you think of the Slashdot effect?

  2. The technology behind TeX by Above · · Score: 5, Insightful

    TeX has always facinated me. Let's face it, it works. I believe there is more bugs than he is writing checks for, but that said they are seldom encountered by mere mortals. If you do normal stuff it just works.

    There is nothing else like it. No commercial product, no non-commercial product. If you want to typeset mathematics, it's the only game in town. If you want to typeset anything, it's one of very few games in town. It's open source. It's multi-platform. It has a huge following, but gets no press.

    It really is an amazing thing, and something that every open source project should aspire to....

    1. Re:The technology behind TeX by Moridineas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Let's not go too far now..Sure, it's a good product, and great for all the reasons you mention, but the only game in town (for mathematics or anything)? No, not really. Sure it's used a lot for university journals (papers etc), by students (engineers at my university HAVE to learn it, even if they only learn bold, center, etc), and even by some tech-oriented presses (some O'Reilly books--not all--use latex for at least some of their content..I'm not sure I've seen even an O'reilly book that uses tex and nothing else).

      In the publishing field, there is quite a lot of software used before latex and from what I understand, it's looked down upon by many as being lower quality (though it seems these stigmas originated in years past...I have no idea if they are still justified)--and I don't mean in comparison to MS Word or WordPerfect. The publishing field still also largely uses Macs...and pre-OSX macs at that.

    2. Re:The technology behind TeX by Papineau · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In the publishing field, there is quite a lot of software used before latex

      And LaTeX has been in use since 1986 IIRC. The current version (LaTeX2e) dates from 1994. I'm not sure the first PowerPC was commercialised at that time.

      Not to mention that LaTeX is an extension of TeX, which is even older. The TeXbook has been published in 1984, which was after the release of the program itself.

      If you have some name of program used before LaTeX and still in use, could you name them for us? Thank you!

    3. Re:The technology behind TeX by Lictor · · Score: 5, Informative

      >but the only game in town (for mathematics or anything)? No, not really.

      I can't speak for general publishing, but for serious math publishing I have to respectfully disagree. If you have ever even remotely come into contact with serious mathematics you will be aware that Springer-Verlag (http://www.springer.de/) is one of the major publishers.

      I have never prepared a manuscript for a Springer book or journal that was *not* in TeX format.

      Could you give me some examples of the "quite a lot of software used before latex"? Specifically what "math" publishers use standards other than TeX... I'd truly be interested because I've never come across one.

      As a side note, please be careful not to confuse LaTeX with TeX. LaTeX (which I admit to using most of the time) is kind of like "TeX for dummies". (Thats not entirely fair... LaTeX makes 95% of what I want to do easier and faster than plain TeX... but for that last 5%, LaTeX makes me want to punch things. LaTeX=easy, TeX=flexible).

    4. Re:The technology behind TeX by ricardo2c · · Score: 3, Funny

      Thats not entirely fair... LaTeX makes 95% of what I want to do easier and faster than plain TeX... but for that last 5%, LaTeX makes me want to punch things. LaTeX=easy, TeX=flexible).

      This should be:
      LaTeX = Flexible... it stretches well, at least!

      --
      --Drake 2c
    5. Re:The technology behind TeX by chialea · · Score: 4, Interesting
      First of all, you get a complete control over the layout. Secondly, you don't have to read tons of manuals in order to use it.

      I don't know exactly what you've done, but as someone who's had to do papers in both word and latex, let me respectfully point out that making a word document look the same (or even have the same number of pages) on multiple computers, let alone multiple versions of Word, is something that made me tear my hair out. You want control, you use TeX. Period. You want a lot of control, but ease of use, you use LaTeX. You want total and complete frustration because your paper is a different number of pages depending on the computer, splits text in the dumbest places (leaves orphan headers), and so on ad nauseum, you use Word. You don't get control with Word. Even when you've micromanaged the text. I spent a week doing this, and vowed never to use Word again, and thus to never submit to this conference. (The conference I was submitting to was a bit out of my area, in any case, and is completely out now.)

      Lea

    6. Re:The technology behind TeX by FFFish · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ventura Publisher, according to this history, was released in April, 1986, by a group of Xerox employees who couldn't get that company to get a clue.

      Same year as LaTex, and with a GUI to boot.

      Still around, still in active development (new release has been mentioned by Corel), and still the best layout application that is available, bar none. Even four or five years after its last release, it still does things that InDesign and Quark don't.

      --

      --
      Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
  3. Mirror by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://russnelson.com/fea-knuth.pdf

    --
    Don't piss off The Angry Economist
  4. acrobat works fine in linux by spotter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Acrobat works fine in linux. I'm currently using the plugin in galeon and it displays fine. No need to use windows.

    Here's another mirror
    http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~spotter/fea-kn uth.pdf

  5. some humor..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    got this in an email a few days ago....

    Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth
    engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest.

    Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in
    the world!"

    Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the
    best operating system in the world!"

    Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."

    1. Re:some humor..... by Dolly_Llama · · Score: 5, Interesting
      You're trolling now, but I just cant resist..

      Hitler was in no way a christian, in fact his aryan beliefs were in almost complete contradiction to any christian belief. And the holocaust was based on race, not religion.


      Hitler was indeed a christian. He did very evil things, but he was still a christian. Your second point however, is correct, the holocaust was about race, however the eugenicists saw it..

      The Christian religion, is one of the primary reasons for the development of Europe to where it is today. Considering the immense influence it has had over the last 1500 years, it it not supprising that bad things came along with the good. The problem is with human nature, compared to any powerful instituion before it, it was a model of civility.

      In fact, Christianity was one of the prime factors holding BACK Western European civilization for the 6-800 years following the fall of the roman empire. What need is there to innovate and to improve your lot in life if the messiah's second coming is right around the corner? It was only after Greco-Roman thought was re-introduced via Islam that Western European civilization started its upswing. Even later, the church had to be pulled kicking and screaming through the centuries by science. From Gailileo to Creationism, the church has had a great damping effect on scientific progress. See A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom for many, many more examples.

      I'm not trying to take a dump on your beliefs. If they work for you, great. Have a cookie. But don't try to paint Christianity, or any other religion too rosy. Like most institutions, it has its darker side, and Christianity has a very dark one indeed.

      --

      Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan

    2. Re:some humor..... by dgroskind · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Or perhaps you have heard of the Third Punic War, which basically amounted to a campaign of genocide.

      This description of the Roman Empire is equivalent to judging Germany solely by Nazi era and ignoring Goethe and Beethoven.

      The reason that Roman was able to hold the loyalty of most of the provinces of Italy when Hannibal invaded was because of the fundamental fairness of its rule. Cathages' provinces in North Africa were anxious to revolt when Rome provided an opportunity because of Carthages' brutality.

      But they were not the nice people you seem to imagine.

      The Roman Empire had its faults but its rule was enlightened by the standards of the time. Within the Empire there was period of peace and prosperity unmatched until modern times.

    3. Re:some humor..... by dgroskind · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It was only after Greco-Roman thought was re-introduced via Islam that Western European civilization started its upswing.

      This statement is plain wrong. Christianity is a synthesis of Hebrew and classical Greek philosophy. If Christianity did anything, it preserved the thought of classical antiquity. Classical authors were widely cited by early Christian thinkers. The idea of theology -- a rational inquiry into the nature of God -- is a Christian invention based on Greek thought.

      The Arabs contributed to medieval thought by making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. However, their sources for Aristotle were Christian sources in Constantinope.

      The Church has been in conflict with science thoughout its existence but it is probably no accident that the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton) were all believing Christians.

  6. Online PDF Conversion Here -- by sh0rtie · · Score: 5, Informative



    http://access.adobe.com/adv_form.html

    just enter the url of said pdf and hit submit and voila good ol' html is returned

  7. It *is* funny by anomaly · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But I think that it's important to note that Donald Knuth, like many other brilliant men, is a Christian. Thus, it's unlikely that he would presume himself to be God.

    It *is* funny, though. :-)

    Regards,
    Anomaly

    --
    But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
  8. More Knuth Stories Wanted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, I would like to ask the slashdot editors to please post more Knuth news. I think that his contributions to Computer Science deserve to be more widely appreciated by everybody even remotely connected with Computer Science (and not only the theoretically inclined people).

    Unfortunately, I recognize that not everybody reading Slashdot has a theoretical education in Computer Science (well, many people are only practically trained -- if such a thing even exists) and miss the elegant construction of algorithms that Donald Knuth does in his books, algorithms which are efficient both regarding space and time (things which I miss in most software being written today, sadly).

    This is not to mention the care with which his books are written, from didactic, technical and typographical standpoints: a lesson on how to write well.

    I guess that the problem I mentioned above about current programmers writing code which is not exactly space- and time-efficient is that they must think "it's not worth it" (or many haven't actually even thought about the subject). A pity indeed.

    This is, unfortunately, one of the bad sides of the ease of current (integrated) programming environments (which doesn't man that they are bad): people which aren't exactly trained can program, their programs run, but in a sub-optimal way.

    I also think that many programming environments are an incentive to trial-and-error programming ("recompiling the program is too easy -- don't even bother to think if we have to add 1 or subtract 1"). This, of course, leads to sloopy programming.

    Anyway, back to Knuth, I would really love to see a Slashdot interview with him, as I would appreciate anything regarding him and computers.

  9. Re:I don't have acrobat. by nomadic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How dare they use an openly documented, commonly used format.

  10. I don't cash my Knuth checks by jquiroga · · Score: 4, Funny
    • To cash my two Knuth checks: $2.94 + $2.56
    • To show them off to my hacker friends and see their faces turn green with envy: Priceless
    1. Re:I don't cash my Knuth checks by PurpleBob · · Score: 5, Funny

      This is Knuth you're talking about. He probably totals his checks in complex numbers.

      --
      Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
  11. Why it's called "All Questions Answered" by sunhou · · Score: 3, Informative

    Apparently Richard Feynman, on the last day of classes each semester, made the class an optional thing where students could come and ask questions on any topic except religion, politics, and the final exam. And Knuth followed his example.

    Now that I'm teaching, I'm thinking of trying that. I can't decide if I really want to exclude religion and politics, though. I wonder if they excluded those topics to avoid offending people, or because they thought those topics are too subjective/personal, or if it was for some other reason?

    I also wonder if anyone would come on that day; the last day of classes in the spring at Cornell is "Slope Day", where all the undergrads hang out on the hill by the main library and get drunk (the police basically look the other way, as long as people aren't getting hurt). It's truly a sight to behold.

  12. Quality, Workmanship, Pride... by PhotoGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Knuth truly does represent much of what is good an interesting about our profession.

    For those who didn't read the article, or didn't come across this fact elsewhere, Knuth actually personally writes a cheque to anyone who finds errors in his books.

    While the algorithms and theory that he wrote about in his classic texts are used by computer programmers worldwide every day, it's unfortunate that the kind of pride of workmanship that he personally demonstrates, doesn't seem to be the norm.

    I've always felt like the programming profession was, and still is, a bit of a joke as far as standardized quality goes, as compared to other engineering disciplines. The old joke, "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs ..." is still frighteningly true; other engineering professions do not often have a commonplace equivalent of a blue-screen or core-dump. There are occasional engineering failures, but none as widespread as programming errors.

    Maybe because we're still forging new ground so quickly that it can't be expected to have solid results. Still, for things as standardized, commonplace, and essential as operating systems, the design should be such that a blue screen is unheard of.

    -me

    --
    Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
  13. Knuth's students by sinserve · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Should really be proud to work with a legend.
    I have been coding in C for six years, without
    seeing the internet, then I saw the picture of
    Denis Ritchie, and I almost brusted in tears ..
    ahem, I actually did.

    I have read about Ritchie, Kernighan, Thomson,
    Pike, and the rest of the bell guys (from books.)
    Then I got into BBSing, and read source code writen by
    Joy (and the rest of BSD), McKenzie (and few other GNUers.)
    , Kees J Bot and the Minix hackers at Vrije or just around MINIX,
    Bob Stout, Paul Hsieh, Terje Mathisen, Delorie, the DOS extender
    scene lead by TRAN and many many others who have release public
    domain Unix and DOS source code.

    I have read almost every line of code, I could lay my hands on. To
    the point I was able to reuse a huge table of hex #defines, I ripped from
    a compression code in another project (I didn't know about perl, and
    generating constants for table driven code was a bitch. I knew about
    code that had the exact same values :-)

    Then I met Knuth. It was a new birth. It had the same effect on me, as
    reading Abelson&Susman had, a bird's eye view of all that is there.

    It took me 11 months to learn Chapter 1 (without the MIX specs!) but after
    that, it was a revelation, and I am never the same man ever since.

  14. math package for HTML by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Informative

    MathML is intended to be such. Without some additional formatting work it wouldn't be a good typesetting language though, as (in the tradition of HTML) it merely specifies the mathematical formulae, leaving their exact rendering up to the browser (while for typesetting you probably want some more exact control).

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  15. Letting browser control rendering is usually good by billstewart · · Score: 3, Informative
    If MathML does a good enough job, and is supported well enough by popular browsers, that's fine - it's the proper approach according to the SGML religion that led to HTML. That way, the browser can respond not only to user preferences, but to the limitations of the display - if it's a clumsy display, the fine tweaking you did is wasted and may make things worse.

    As an example of what can go wrong, look at your average TeX-written math/cs paper on your average PC screen. The font's too grainy and greeky to read at 75-100dpi, and it's probably in some two-column format that looks really nice printed on portrait-mode dead trees, but is horrendously annoying to read on a portrait-mode screen that can only display about half a paper page at bad resolution. Arrrgh!

    Somebody once commented that there are better renditions of the TeX fonts for PCs - I think it was a TrueType implementation of CMR fonts or something, but it's been too long to remember the correct details.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  16. Re:Letting browser control rendering is usually go by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I tend to agree, LaTeX/TeX is pretty horrible for computer-readable stuff. It's basically designed for typesetting printed pages, and is only really good at that. But many papers are available like that because the authors are writing them primarily for journals, and outputting to a PDF they put up on their website is the easiest way to publish it online.

    So yes, for web stuff, I think MathML is the best choice. It's now supported by default in the latest Mozilla; I don't know about other browsers. Unfortunately it's not usable in a standard HTML document, but only in XHTML documents (XML/CSS basically), which makes it have a bit of a learning curve. But then again LaTeX certainly has a learning curve...

    The main argument I've seen against MathML by mathematicians is that it's clumsier than LaTeX to use a lot, especially for those who are already used to LaTeX. Basically this is due to the nature of XML tags -- and pairs are going to be more clumsy to use a lot than LaTeX's \( and \) commands.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  17. LaTeX and PDF by borud · · Score: 3, Informative
    As an example of what can go wrong, look at your average TeX-written math/cs paper on your average PC screen. The font's too grainy and greeky to read at 75-100dpi [...]

    I usually generate two outputs of my LaTeX documents: Postscript and PDF. The PDF version usually looks a bit better on screen than the PostScript version.

    mind you: I generate the PDF version using pdflatex . I can't remember exactly, but I think I've seen a utility that converts DVI files to PDF and that this produced horrible output. use pdflatex .

    because generate multiple output formats (PS, PDF and HTML) from the same LaTeX document, I usually use a package I wrote that contains a lot of convenient macros to make use of the different features in the different formats -- in addition to automating a lot of boring tasks.

    I remember how delighted I was when I discovered pdflatex. once you work it into your repertoire you get all this cool stuff for free, like hyperlinks in PDF documents etc. I really recommend you give it a try.

    Check out the PDFTeX web page for more information.
    Also have a look at Matt Welsh' page about creating presentations in PDFLaTeX. He has some useful information on how to install TrueType fonts for use by PDFLaTeX.

    -Bjørn

  18. Re:Biggest problem with TeX by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 3, Funny
    How do you pronounce TeX?

    It's Teh-Ten, damn it! - Steve Jobs