“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

— Donald Ervin Knuth , Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Foreword to the book A=B http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html (1996)
Source: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

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Donald Ervin Knuth 32

American computer scientist 1938

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“Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

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“Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.”

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“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

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“[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes…and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.”

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“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

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“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

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“We are not asking whether all digital computers would do well in the game nor whether the computers at present available would do well, but whether there are imaginable computers which would do well.”

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“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

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