person:donald knuth

The Yoda of Silicon Valley - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algorithms-programming.html

Donald Knuth, master of algorithms, reflects on 50 years of his opus-in-progress, “The Art of Computer Programming.”

très beau portrait #algorithmes #tex (#latex)

An interview with David Fuchs: TeX pioneer and designer of the DVI file format - Overleaf Blog
▻https://www.overleaf.com/blog/618-an-interview-with-david-fuchs-tex-pioneer-and-designer-of-the-dvi-file

TeX has a rich history and it’s our pleasure to publish this interview with David Fuchs—a name that will be a familiar name to anyone who is aware of the origins of TeX. David worked with Donald Knuth for almost 8 years to develop the first versions of TeX and MetaFont.

David got in touch with us earlier this year and I wanted to share some of our conversation with you. David took me through a brief look at how TeX came to be and we talked about what might be coming next in TeX development.

#TeX #histoire_de_l_informatique

The collaboration curse
▻http://www.economist.com/news/business/21688872-fashion-making-employees-collaborate-has-gone-too-far-collaborat

A growing body of academic evidence demonstrates just how serious the problem is. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, discovered that interruptions, even short ones, increase the total time required to complete a task by a significant amount. A succession of studies have shown that multitasking reduces the quality of work as well as dragging it out. Sophie Leroy, formerly of the University of Minnesota (now at the University of Washington Bothell) has added an interesting twist to this argument: jumping rapidly from one task to another also reduces efficiency because of something she calls “attention residue”. The mind continues to think about the old task even as it jumps to a new one.

A second objection is that, whereas managers may notice the benefits of collaboration, they fail to measure its costs. Rob Cross and Peter Gray of the University of Virginia’s business school estimate that knowledge workers spend 70-85% of their time attending meetings (virtual or face-to-face), dealing with e-mail, talking on the phone or otherwise dealing with an avalanche of requests for input or advice. Many employees are spending so much time interacting that they have to do much of their work when they get home at night. Tom Cochran, a former chief technology officer of Atlantic Media, calculated that the midsized firm was spending more than $1m a year on processing e-mails, with each one costing on average around 95 cents in labour costs. “A free and frictionless method of communication,” he notes, has “soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet.”

Mark Bolino of the University of Oklahoma points to a hidden cost of collaboration. Some employees are such enthusiastic collaborators that they are asked to weigh in on every issue. But it does not take long for top collaborators to become bottlenecks: nothing happens until they have had their say—and they have their say on lots of subjects that are outside their competence.

The biggest problem with collaboration is that it makes what Mr Newport calls “deep work” difficult, if not impossible. Deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy: it is only by concentrating intensely that you can master a difficult discipline or solve a demanding problem. Many of the most productive knowledge workers go out of their way to avoid meetings and unplug electronic distractions. Peter Drucker, a management thinker, argued that you can do real work or go to meetings but you cannot do both. Jonathan Franzen, an author, unplugs from the internet when he is writing. Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, refuses to use e-mail on the ground that his job is to be “on the bottom of things” rather than “on top of things”. Richard Feynman, a legendary physicist, extolled the virtues of “active irresponsibility” when it came to taking part in academic meetings.

KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web
▻http://khan.github.io/KaTeX

Fast: KaTeX renders its math synchronously and doesn’t need to reflow the page.
Print quality: KaTeX’s layout is based on Donald Knuth’s TeX, the gold standard for math typesetting.
Self contained: KaTeX has no dependencies and can easily be bundled with your website resources.
Server side rendering: KaTeX produces the same output regardless of browser or environment, so you can pre-render expressions using Node.js and send them as plain HTML.

Brevets logiciels : la position de Donald Knuth en 1995
▻http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2014/08/11/donald-knuth-brevets-logiciels-1995

En 1995, l’un des plus brillants informaticiens au monde, le professeur Donald Knuth, écrivait une lettre au bureau américain des brevets (USPTO) que nous vous proposons traduite ci-dessous.

#Brevet_logiciel #Code_informatique #Donald_Knuth #Informatique #États-Unis

Don Knuth versus #Email
►http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible #concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer #science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

#recherche