"I thank God for not making me a computer scientist"

Daniel J. Bernstein’s statement, “I thank God for not making me a computer scientist,” expresses a subtle and layered disavowal of institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Instead of simply rejecting the title, Bernstein hints at the freedom and creativity he feels by not being bound to the formal identity of “computer scientist” as typically defined by academia and professional societies. His body of work, spanning cryptography, programming, mathematics, and open-source software, often defies easy categorization, suggesting a deliberate embrace of interdisciplinary thinking. The word "computer scientist" here carries connotations of rigid curricula, credentialism, and perhaps the bureaucracy and politics endemic to many academic fields. Bernstein’s gratitude, then, is not just for his own trajectory, but for the possibility of engaging with computation on open terms, unmoored from the limiting expectations of a formally constructed profession.

There is also a playful echo of a traditional religious phrase, “Blessed are you, Lord, who has not made me…”, remixed here with a modern, intellectual vocation. The invocation of divine gratitude is tongue-in-cheek but hints at a sense of relief, even deliverance, from what he perceives as the constraints or orthodoxy of mainstream computer science. Bernstein has been famously iconoclastic, skipping peer review in favor of public, transparent critique, and challenging widely accepted cryptographic algorithms. His rejection of the label suggests an argument that transformative or groundbreaking work in computation often emerges on the fringe, outside neatly defined disciplines, by those who are restless in spirit and irreverent toward dogma.

At its core, the phrase reflects a belief that genuine innovation, particularly in technical fields, is stifled by overidentification with formal roles. By declining the mantle of “computer scientist,” Bernstein claims a broader intellectual territory and signals the value of work unconstrained by disciplinary identity, welcoming exploration, dissent, and cross-pollination from adjacent domains.