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Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Donald Knuth is planning to make an 'earthshaking announcement' on Wednesday, at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what it is. So far speculation ranges from proving P!=NP, to a new volume of The Art of Computer Programming, to his retirement. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever has been ported to MMIX?" Let the speculation begin.
So it probably TeX related. I don't see Knuth going off topic so much. Of course, the TeX engine is earth in that community, so who knows?
unless of course, your Albert Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Ernst Ruska, or any number of other important members of the scientific community throughout the centuries. many of these people did not provide 'breakthroughs until well into there 30's, and most of them continued to provide useful advances in science well into there later years.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Breakthrough proofs tend to be completed by kids in their early to mid 20's, it's when the brain is still plastic enough for truly out of the box thinking but where enough knowledge has been gathered to actually work on the hard problems.
Perhaps also because they actually have the opportunity.
Older people, who may still be plenty capable while having much more experience, seldom have the opportunity (due to mortgage, family, etc.)
Almost all incentives are given to youth (which makes sense). But older people seldom get a break. I think this, more than anything else, is what causes peoples brains to go stale.
Makes me wonder why anyone would assume everyone on ./ knows who he is, what he's done, or why we should care what he has to announce...
Seriously? To draw a comparison, it's like being a geneticist and not knowing who Gregor Mendel is. Or a physicist/mathematician and drawing a blank when Sir Isaac Newton's name comes up. You could be a philosopher who has never heard of Aristotle or Plato. Or a FLOSS developer who has never heard of Richard Stallman. A game developer who has never heard of John Carmack. I could go on, but I'm not sure I could find a good stopping point and I'm fighting the impulse to just be insulting. Your ignorance is appalling. Please just smash your computer with a sledgehammer and go for a long walk on a short pier.
Not that surprising. Being capable of sustaining epic levels of cognitive dissonance would be needed to be able to work for Monsanto and sleep at night.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question; a lot of algorithmics and tons of fantastic work in combinatorics, but I can't think of a single significant result he's contributed to complexity theory. While it's not impossible that he could have some sort of 'outsider breakthrough', it seems almost infinitesimally unlikely given the mathematical context and techniques that have had to be developed for similar complexity problems. My money would be on either a formal open-sourcing of the TeX codebase or the development of a full HTML5 rendering engine for TeX along the lines of the system that mathoverflow.net uses.
Yes it has, actually.
You just aren't equipped to recognize that fact.
I learned how to program outside of academia, and have read Knuth. Independent study should still involve some modicum of actual study.
You missed the car analogy. It'd be like a car enthusiast who's never heard of Ford. You always have to have a car analogy. It's the law!
That age may well be when he had his insight on the speed of light being constant and time being malleable, though the actual work of course only just started.
The insight that the speed of light is constant is somewhat older and goes back to James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations are based on a constant speed of light. The only thing that was not clear was if the speed of light is also constant under cosmic conditions. The series of Michelson's experiments to find variances in the speed of light started in 1881, and in 1892 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in collaboration with Henri Poincaré published the Lorentz Ether Theory including the basic mathematics of Special Relativity.
Albert Einstein's genius was thus not to postulate the constant speed of light in vacuum, or the time- and distance contractions resulting from there, but the abolishment of the ether as medium for the light.
It's pathetic that you think nobody else can think for themselves or come up with their own ideas and breakthroughs.
Do you honestly think that you can come up with the kind of breakthroughs that have been done in CS over the past 60 years without reading some of the literature?
Sure, if you write some simple scripts or basic applications, you don't need to know much about algorithms, but once you start messing about with algorithms and datastructures, it pays to at least have heard of Knuth.