<story><title>Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit</title><url>http://www.catonmat.net/blog/don-knuth-steve-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lkozma</author><text>On a related note, I received a (regular, handwritten) mail from Donald Knuth today, in reply to an email in which I reported some (what I thought were) small errors in TAOCP (which turned out not to be errors afterall - so no reward check for me :).&lt;p&gt;I found one of his comments on my email funny. I started by saying &quot;I am reading your book with great interest, at the same time hunting for small errors.&quot; He wrote next to it: &quot;so why don&apos;t you start hunting for the big ones?&quot;. Inspiring on many levels :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit</title><url>http://www.catonmat.net/blog/don-knuth-steve-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bugsy</author><text>In the video that is found at the cited link, Knuth doesn&apos;t clearly say there that the incident didn&apos;t happen.&lt;p&gt;He says that he gets asked about this story and he met both Jobs and Gates only a few times and that in each case he was more impressed by them than they were of him.&lt;p&gt;The story is definitely false because Knuth is a very polite and modest person who has never been the sort of person that says &quot;you&apos;re full of shit&quot; to anyone.&lt;p&gt;More conclusively, another person in this thread pointed to the letter from Knuth in his own handwriting in which he says the Jobs story is untrue:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://markharrison.net/stackoverflow/knuth/knuth-page2-enlarged.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://markharrison.net/stackoverflow/knuth/knuth-page2-enla...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>