[svat]

Knuth wrote that preface in the early 1960s, when it was indeed true that much of what little there was of published mathematical study related to programming was faulty. He succeeded incredibly well: he kickstarted the entire field of "analysis of algorithms", got all the details right and organized them extremely clearly, put it on a sound footing, and now mathematicians take it seriously, and published work in the area is of high quality.

[vario]

Thank you very much, for educating me.