Nice little speech, and his conclusion is much less inflammatory than your quote suggests (it would be strange if Knuth was really against mathematical theory).

Nice little speech, and his conclusion is much less inflammatory than your quote suggests (it would be strange if Knuth was really against mathematical theory). Reading his examples, I feel as if time has been kind to mathematical theory. n has gotten a lot larger these days, and random access memory also simplifies some analyses. That's not always true, and the gap he identifies is still real, but maybe it's not always as important as it was.