Today I came by a Birthday Tributes Speech by Herbert Wilf given on Donald Knuth's birthday in 2002. I quote some parts of the first half of the speech where he pulls Knuth's leg a little bit for his emphasis (obsession/passion?) on using correct notation and correct typesetting.
" [...]
Don is one of the great communicators of the twentieth, and we all wish for him, the twenty-first centuries. Actually, that depends a little bit on which endpoint of the vector of communication Don is sitting at. If he is at the initial vertex of that arrow, he is supreme. His papers, books, web site, and other writings and talks, are brilliantly original, and crystal clear. All of us, very much including yours truly, have learned a lot about clarity of scientific communication from his example.
On the other hand - if Don is sitting at the terminal vertex of the arrow of communication, life is a bit different. You have to do a lot of things right in order to get your thoughts through to him.
First, abandon e-mail, all ye who seek to enter here. [...] So you take the hint, and after writing 37 e-mail messages to various addresses that you thought might have gotten through to him, you decide on written communication. Of course, since you are about to write to the creator of TEX, you are not about to write in Microsoft Word, are you? Of course not. To show your respect for your addressee and his creations, you will write in TEX, and so you do. You spend a great deal of effort to get it to look pretty, and you send it off. Let's say that you're writing in order to describe a proof that P = NP which you've recently found. Unbeknownst to you, your letter will be placed on a stack that already has 5,379 letters that reached him before yours did, and which are waiting while he completes his latest additions to 47 new manuscripts and 311 revisions of already existing books. But one day, probably in the same year, your moment will come. He'll read your letter and give you his reply. You eagerly tear open the envelope that reaches you, and what you find inside is your own letter to him, on which he will have pencilled a number of pithy comments on your theorem. Really insightful comments, that make you pleased to have gotten the benefit of Don's knowledge and brilliance. For example, "It's best to use a backslash comma here, in order to get exactly .073 ems of space," or, "the backslash mathchardef doesn't belong here; see page 397 of the TEXBook for a better way," etc. [...]
You take a clue from Don's reply, which was a pencilled scrawl on your original message. That's it! You'll sit down and write, by hand, in pen and ink, on fine paper, the whole P = NP proof. Then, at least, you'll be past the TEX barrier and into real mathematical give-and-take. And so you do. [...]
Breathlessly you tear open the envelope once more, and again you read the now-familiar pencilled scrawl, this time wrapped around the words of your elegant handwritten letter. In one place it says "Good grief! The Euler numbers of the fourth kind cannot be denoted by E(n, k)! That notation went out in 1642 in the writings of Fermat, and since then everybody should be using the triple parentheses with the n upstairs and the k downstairs." [...]
I could go on with a description of the complete Inbound Communication Algorithm, but I won't because there's a better way. The Collected Works of Monty Python's Flying Circus are well known to have the property, shared only by the Bible, by the works of Shakespeare, and by The Art of Computer Programming, that whatever it is that you would like to say, they have already said it, and in a more interesting way than you would have. So let me show you a video of the Monty Python group doing the Police Station skit, which summarizes such communication problems as I have been describing, [...]"
It is quite a fascinating speech. He actually shows a Monty Python Video in the middle of his speech (you can find the part he is referring to
here) and he concludes his talk by giving Don Knuth his birthday present, a Theorem in the subject of combinatorial
sequences! I just envy such a life, it is my utopian dream to receive a theorem as a birthday gift.
