“The journey is more important than the destination—that’s part of life,” he says. “If you only live for getting to the end, you’re almost always disappointed.” Perhaps, he adds, what seems like a liability is really a stroke of luck. “If I had been good at making estimates of how long something was going to take, I never would have started.”
From this profile of Knuth in Stanford Magazine; via Kieran Healy.
Knuth’s essay titled Algorithmic Themes (pdf) in A Century of Mathematics in America, Part I is a very good read too; in fact, Knuth begins the essay by comparing math to music indicating his two life-long passions!
