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The following anecdote about Steve Jobs is from [1]:

I was sitting in Steve's office when Lynn Takahashi,. Steve's assistant, announced Knuth's arrival. Steve bounced out of his chair, bounded over to the door and extended a welcoming hand.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

[1] - http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...




I think this is suspect on the face of it--was Steve Jobs known for fabrications? Giant dreams, yes, but known to say outrageous falsehoods?

Further, Donald Knuth, as is pointed out in another link on this thread, is quite humble and polite and unlikely to have called anyone full of shit.

This is uninteresting and very likely wrong. Let's not post junk like this.


>> was Steve Jobs known for fabrications? ... known to say outrageous falsehoods?

Just off the top of my head... He lied to Woz about being paid to develop break out and stole money from him to go to India; He presented essentially a block of wood as the finished, functioning iPhone in 2008-ish; oh, and he denied paternity of his daughter Lisa as in "I am not the father" even after a paternity test. The last one seems pretty outrageous.

I'm not convinced he viewed himself as outright lying; He probably had seen Knuth's books and in his brain that meant he had read and understood them in their entirety.

So maybe don't be so quick to dismiss this as junk. It's a pretty innocuous example but completely inline with his behavior.


These make sense, but somehow they are more of the manipulative variety, whereas the incident with Knuth was outright bragging, which seems less like him.


Seems more like pandering than bragging. Or maybe just lying out of self consciousness.


It's a beautiful bit of folklore, but is probably apocryphal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634635


I wonder if that anecdote exists s/Knuth/Asimov/.

TAOCP is in my opinion like the Bible. If you've "read" it, you probably didn't study the begats* and skimmed it out of order quite a bit.

* e.g. the fold-out charts in the tape sorting section


I have two editions of TAoCP. One is from the first publication way back when. The latest has the third revision of Volume 1-3. It has the foldout.

However, this is not in the modern editions, as apparently even the mainframe folks don't sort on tape any more.

(I am keeping the old set for nostalgia, and read/reference the newer volumes.)




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