Donald Knuth and a deplorable trend in the history of science

[Lionel Mandrake]

The creator of TeX and Metafont is passionate about the history of science in general, and the history computer science in particular. He praises historians of math, who continue to publish articles with technical content. He despises the "externalist" trends in histories of other sciences.

I agree with him. The problem as I see it is that most so-called historians of science don't know squat about science, and what's more, they don't want to learn squat about science. They are underachievers and proud of it, man. They are interested only in the view of science from the outside, and their pseudo-scholarly articles lack technical content. George Sarton (the founder of the discipline of history of science) must be turning over in his grave.

Here is Donald Knuth's lecture on this preposterous state of affairs:

[Xipe Totec]

1. Describing Donald Knuth as the creator of TeX and Metafont

is like describing Newton as the guy who noticed apples falling from trees.

He is the author of the most monumental corpus of computing algorithms; "The Art of Computer Programming".

[Lionel Mandrake]

2. It's more like describing Newton as an unorthodox Christian who dabbled in alchemy.

But I suspect more people use TeX or LaTeX than have read those books.

Like many people interested in computers, I haven't been sufficiently motivated to study the imaginary MIX computer or its assembly language. Other than that, I'm a big fan of those books.