I keep them around as a reminder that Computer Science is math. Being able to reason and think mathematically is an important skill for any programmer. A pers

I keep them around as a reminder that Computer Science is math. Being able to reason and think mathematically is an important skill for any programmer. A person can go pretty far doing web work and using scripting languages, but when you get into serious programming (heavily concurrent, resource-critical, real-time, etc) you need to understand the fundamentals. Having Knuth up on the shelf reminds me to take a second and say, "Hey, think this through some more. Knuth probably figured it out already."