When Steve Jobs met Don Knuth | Hacker News Reader

When Steve Jobs met Don Knuth

folklore.org

47 pointsnickb11 comments

Note the comment:

from Mike Boich: I was actually present for this. My recollection was that Don Knuth's response was more along the lines of "I seriously doubt that". (It was still quite amusing though!)

I imagine Woz would have gotten a very different response!

Guess Knuth bluntly meant that Jobs was lying. Hardly any one could have managed to digest "all" his books.

I think there are people that can read and digest all his books, especially in SV, but Knuth would have known about them already or something.

I am sure I have heard this before as an anecdote, not involving Steve Jobs (I recall it was someone at a church that Don Knuth happened to attend).

I am too lazy to check snopes for this though.

any info on if this is true? also, did Knuth mean Job's was full of it that "he read all his books" or just full of it in general? ;)

well, http://www.literateprogramming.com/byte1996.html has an interview with Knuth saying that Jobs had talked to him so it's potentially possible:

Knuth: Steve Jobs once told me in 1980 that he had a vision where every day we'd get a CD-ROM with a thousand brand new programs on it, and that although each program would cost just $5, the number of potential users for each program would be high enough that software developers would get a good return on their work.

Maybe Knuth was more of a rebel back in the day, but somehow I can't imagine him having that sort of response.

In Randall Munroe's Authors@Google talk [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24], Don Knuth asks him a question at ~21:30 and at ~25:30 Randall asks Knuth about this very anecdote. Knuth's response is "I've been told this story a number of times...but I was impressed by him more than he was impressed by me."

"You're full of shit."

Which great innovator isn't?

Seriously, think about what goes into it. You have to believe that you are capable of changing the reigning viewpoint, that almost everybody else in the field is wrong. Without an epic ego, great innovators would never get started.

Your comment seems to be more relevant to your own issues than to the actual story, but let me just point out that the "Steve Jobs" character in the story (let's ignore the question of whether or not it's actually true) isn't demonstrating an "epic ego" at all. He's being cloyingly sycophantic.

What does a man with an epic ego say when he meets Donald Knuth? Probably "Hi, nice to meet you".

I love that quote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com