Things a computer scientist rarely talks about
I just finished reading Donald Knuth’s “Things a computer scientist rarely talks about”; and thought it fits nicely into this series of literature-related posts. The book is a transcription of 6 lectures Don Knuth gave at MIT about “God and Computers”.
Knuth is surely best-known to most of us for working on the ingenious “The Art of Computer Programming” volumes. But he is also a Lutheran Christian, occasional bible teacher and author of “3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated”, in which he writes about using a random sample of bible verses that he studied in depth in order to gain more insight into the scriptures. In the book at hand he mainly reports on how and why he undertook that project and then expands on what else his studies in computer science (mainly math and algorithms) have taught him about his faith.
Being a Christian and computer scientist myself, my main motivation to reading the book was to read some educated thoughts on the topic by someone who is vastly famous for his research. I had a wonderful time getting to know the author a little bit better through his anecdotic lecturing style: Knuth shows a fine sense of humor, a very unaffected manner of talking and anyway a penetrating perfectionism in everything he touches. That enables him to cite a vast amount of literature related to his topics at hand, what makes these lectures also a honey pot in general education.
Regarding faith, the book skillfully confirmed some feelings that I had: Computer Science’s methods can be helpful also when working with “theological data” (like random sampling applied to bible verses), and its theories can illustrate some of gods attributes (like demonstrating the incomprehensibly vast magnitute of finite numbers helps appreciating infiniteness even more). But in the end, I find it more interesting to hear the computer scientist talk about god than merely reading what computer science as a discipline can contribute.