Really Old Geek

The New York Times published an article about Donald Knuth “The Yoda of Silicon Valley”. The article might idolize his work and impact, but provides a great overview of his work. Mr. Knuth is a living legend in the field of computer science, known mainly for his seminal book on algorithms “The Art Of Computer Programming (TAOCP)”.

Given Knuth’s life-time work on algorithms, the following quote from him might be surprising: “I am worried that algorithms are getting too prominent in the world. It started out that computer scientists were worried nobody was listening to us. Now I’m worried that too many people are listening.” I think it is in direct reference to usage of algorithms and their biases in Machine Learning (ML).

For a different take on TAOCP, read this post on Medium, where the author jokes that a lot of people claim how important the book is, without actually reading it.