Knuth spoke at Brown somewhere around 1967-1969, to a capacity crowd in Sayles Hall. It might have been part of a conference on Statistical Computer Performance Evaluation that Walter Freiberger put on. His presentation medium was slides in a Kodak Carousel, and there was a bit of a glitch when someone turned it upside down and it became apparent that the locking ring holding them in wasn't locked -- perhaps a hundred slides hit the floor. There was much jocularity about what sorting algorithm to use to get them back in order. Bob Munck '67

@johnnyhavok2.057

4 жыл бұрын

You're practically a legend.

It is not inaudible at 1:21:08. He says "So a guy named Carsten Sinz in Germany".

Carsten Sinz, mentioned at 1:21:12, was my algorithms professor at Uni. Crazy to see him mentioned here.

39:14 "so we have to have ethnic cleansing" lol knuth has a great sense of humor

@mbzdotdev

3 жыл бұрын

ikr i was pissed at why no one in the room laughed

Knuth comes on stage: 4:42

Mathematicians really messed up with the notation of AND and OR. It's difficult to remember which one is which. I much prefer + and . or the C-like system of | and &.

@RobertJacobson

3 жыл бұрын

The ∧ looks like an A without the crossbar, A for AND. The ∨ is analogous to the union symbol ∪, which is a U for UNION. Mathematicians do sometimes use the notation of addition and multiplication for boolean logic. See, for example, The Laws of Thought by George Boole himself. It's an accepted alternate notation. I prefer it, too. It reminds students of the operator precedence. I wonder what the origin of ∧ and ∨ is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@pervognsen_bitwise

3 жыл бұрын

The other thing is that the visual symmetry between the symbols reflects the underlying lattice duality (de Morgan's laws). If you turn the lattice "upside down" by exchanging top/bottom (true/false) and meet/join (and/or) you get an equivalent lattice. While the relationship to addition and multiplication via + and * is suggestive in some respects and I do tend to use it when doing Boolean algebra calculations, it hides the duality relationship.