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Donald Knuth MBTI Personality Type

Donald Knuth MBTI Personality Type

Donald Knuth Personality Type

Personality
Biography
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Personality

What personality type is Donald Knuth? Donald Knuth is an INTP personality type in MBTI, 5w6 - so/sp - in Enneagram, RCOAI in Big 5, LII in Socionics.

I can't believe this precious soul hasn't received more personality analysis. Knuth is the Yoda of Computer Science, the OG hermit geek, and the father of algorithms. Very, very deep Ti, with playful injections of Ne. I take continual inspiration from him to sharpen my Ti and avoid dilettantism (something ENTPs are more prone to). He encourages people to go as deep as possible into one's subject of interest. Knuth has a lot to say about not chasing fashionable ideas, but rather thinking of oneself as a craftsman and doing good, honest work. By taking up Knuth's advice in my own scientific career, I've learned to enjoy the process much more, including the minutiae and crossing the i's and dotting the t's. Instead of relying on my Inf Si to try to (unsuccessfully) stabilize my daily habits and routines, I took up his advice “Instead of planning something—saying that I need to do this, then this, then this—see something that needs to be done and do it. Pick something up.” It's worked very well for me when I need get started on a project but am procrastinating. He has good advice for housekeeping when doing knowledge work that could be applied to any endeavor that requires patience and attention to detail: https://theorydish.blog/2018/02/26/donald-knuth-on-writing-up-research/ https://theorydish.blog/2018/02/01/donald-knuth-on-doing-research/ He's truly a lesson for those who want to find enjoyment in painstaking efforts that take a long time to bear fruit (his ~3000 page tome on Art of Computer Programming is still a work in progress after decades).

Biography

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prizeof computer science.