Not the OP, but what bothers me is not that Knuth is relgious (but see update below), that is perfectly fine. What bothers me is that he chooses to proselytize his religion in a technical publication. That seems inappropriate to me. Imagine the reaction if instead of glorifying God, he had written instead, "Finally, I hope that this paper may glorify Allah the compassionate and merciful..."
[UPDATE] I made a mistake here and assumed that Knuth had written this because I happen to know that he's a Christian, but I was wrong about that. And in retrospect I should have realized that I was wrong because Knuth is actually quite scrupulous about keeping his religious views private. But I stand by the substance of my comment subject to s/Knuth/Tøndering.
> Not the OP, but what bothers me is not that Knuth is relgious, that is perfectly fine. What bothers me is that he chooses to proselytize his religion in a technical publication. That seems inappropriate to me.
First of all, the quote is not by Knuth, but by Claus Tøndering (the author of the paper linked). Second of all, the "Preface," where the quote is snipped from, is just that -- a preface -- a lot of people thank their moms in there.
It's just much ado about nothing and annoying posturing. Why is why I, and I'd assume others, take issue with it.
Math is made by humans to be learned and applied by humans. There's no need for marketing in the form of pretext formalities. If anything, we should savour the human metadata to math - the last decades before AI takes over.
[UPDATE] I made a mistake here and assumed that Knuth had written this because I happen to know that he's a Christian, but I was wrong about that. And in retrospect I should have realized that I was wrong because Knuth is actually quite scrupulous about keeping his religious views private. But I stand by the substance of my comment subject to s/Knuth/Tøndering.