iFAQ is real
Infrequently Asked QuestionsBy Donald Ervin Knuth (Ka-NOOTH)
Why does my country have the right to be occupying Iraq?
Why should my country not support an international court of justice?
Is my country not strong enough to achieve its aims fairly?
When the leaders of a country cause it to do terrible things, what is the best way to restore the honor of that country?
Is it possible for potential new leaders to raise questions about their country’s possible guilt, without committing political suicide?
Do I deserve retribution from aggrieved people whose lives have been ruined by actions that my leaders have taken without my consent?
How can I best help set in motion a process by which reparations are made to people who have been harmed by unjust deeds of my country?
If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won’t the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?
Donald E. Knuth is the Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. He is the man who is writing this book for the last 46 years, started at 1962. American Scientist has included this work among the best twelve physical-science monographs of the twentieth century. The other 11 are Dirac on quantum mechanics, Einstein on relativity, Mandelbrot on fractals, Pauling on the chemical bond, Russell and Whitehead on foundations of mathematics, von Neumann and Morgenstern on game theory, Wiener on cybernetics, Woodward and Hoffmann on orbital symmetry, Feynman on quantum electrodynamics, Smith on the search for structure, and Einstein’s collected papers.1
All this is still within expected. What is beyond expectation is the iFAQ! Why does a man like Donald Knuth need to put in black and white these uncomfortable and totally un-mathematical questions in his official website? My best shot is this saying from Arthur C. Clarke:
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
Knuth says, “Perhaps the best clues to the outlines of successful answers can be found in a wonderful speech that Richard von Weizsäcker gave in 1985.
