Karen A. Frenkel

"Age 30 is kind of appropriate because I got the first copy of volume 1 from the publisher nine days after my 30th birthday. So, a large part of the work had been done when I was 30 years old. They already were working on typesetting the second volume." Commenting on his books' influence, Knuth says, "It's been phenomenal from my point of view. In 1976 a study was done of how many people writing papers on computer science made a reference to my book somewhere in their articles, and it was found that about 30 percent of the papers in Communications, Journal of the ACM, and SIAM Journal on Computing cited the book. So it has an impact in that way." What about sales? Knuth notes that publishers may joke about professors whose books never sell, but they don't apply here. "I know that people buy the book. I don't know how many read it. But the sales have been incredible. I think something between 1000 and 2000 copies [have been sold] per month for 20 years."

"Most of the work I've done has been done to break things into existence that didn't exist before. . . . In a sense, my whole career's been about building organizations that didn't exist before, creating processes to do things that have never been done before, and solving technical problems that hadn't been solved before. The work I did at MIT was that way as well. There was no real foundation to build on, and I had to make it up as I went along. That's characterized, if not my whole career, at least the parts of my career that I consider the most rewarding." "Pioneers are also the people that get arrows shot through them. That's the downside, and I've had my share of arrows pulled out of my hide."

"When the Securities Exchange Commission was created by Franklin Roosevelt, he was trying to fix a lot of problems on Wall Street. There were various Ivan Boesky-type crimes being committed on the stock market, and Roosevelt wanted to create a regulatory agency that would keep it in line. He wanted to hire a sheriff to police Wall Street. What he did was he hired the person who was absolutely, unarguably, the biggest criminal on Wall Street—the person who was guilty of the most crimes. And he put him in charge of the Securities Exchange Commission, figuring that that person, being the most successful Wall Street bandit, knew all the tricks and could police his friends. And that person did a really good job of cleaning up Wall Street actually, because he did know all the tricks." "In a certain sense, I got my start in the computer business by bending the rules, or not knowing what the rules were. I was extremely good at penetrating everyone's computer security when I was a kid. And, because of my tremendous knowledge in this area, I have frequently been called in to help catch people who break in. . . ."