Email (let's drop the hyphen)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer
had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems
to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top
of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.
What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try
to digest that knowledge into
a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over
the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people
who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is
to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every
six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use
good ol' snail mail and send a letter to the following address:
Prof. Donald E. Knuth
Computer Science Department
CoDa Building room W208
389 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5008 USA.
I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming postal mail and separates
out anything that she knows I've been looking forward to seeing urgently.
Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.
My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to
taocp@cs.stanford.eduorknuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu,
so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance. If I run
across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the message
asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get angry.
I used to just throw all such sheets in the wastebasket.
But now I save them for scratch paper, so that
I can print test material for The Art of Computer Programming on
the blank sides. I DO NOT ANSWER UNSOLICITED EMAILS, nor do I respond to
emails that were sent to my colleagues with a bothersome request for them to
communicate with me. Email is a no-no EXCEPT for reporting errors in books.
`I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main
purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
Sometimes I do send email, through my secretary, with respect to the
project I'm currently working on, when I believe that the recipient
won't be bothered by my request. But I hope you can understand why I
am almost always unhappy to receive unsolicited email myself.
Thank you for your patience and cooperation as I try to finish
The Art of Computer Programming
(TAOCP),
a work that I began in 1962 and that I will need many years to complete.
In return, I promise not to send unwelcome email requests to you.
A note on email versus e-mail
Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the
hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people
used to write “non-zero” and “soft-ware” instead of “nonzero”
and “software”; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of
other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic
spelling “e-mail”. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in
your lifetime if you stop now! The form “email” has been well
established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see
Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course,
“email” has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands
much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)
Don Knuth's home page