Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is an acclaimed computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. As the author of the widely-cited, multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming , Knuth contributed significantly to the field of rigorous analysis of algorithms. He is also known for creating of the TeX typesetting system and of the METAFONT font design system, and pioneering the concept of literate programming. Knuth was born on January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Academic achievements

In 1960, Knuth simultaneously earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree in mathematics from the Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University). In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, where he became a professor and began work on The Art of Computer Programming, originally planned as a seven-volume series.

In 1968, he joined the faculty of Stanford University and published the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming. In 1976, after producing the third volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth created the influential TeX and METAFONT tools as a result of his frustration with the electronic publishing tools used to provide input to photo-typesetters. In 1990, Stanford awarded Knuth the singular academic title of Professor of the Art of Computer Programming, which was revised to Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming upon his 1992 retirement from teaching at Stanford University. Knuth continued work on The Art of Computer Programming. By 2004, revised versions of the first three volumes had been re-issued, and Knuth continued working on volume four, excerpts of which are released periodically on his website.

Since 1990, Knuth has declined to use electronic mail, declaring it to be too inefficient and time-consuming. Instead, a secretary monitors an email account on his behalf. He corresponds in "batch mode", such as one day every three months, to be sent by postal mail. In recent years, Knuth has given informal lectures a few times a year at Stanford University, which he calls Computer Musings. He is also a visiting professor at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory in the United Kingdom.

Awards and honors

Throughout his career, Donald Knuth has been recognized for his many accomplishments, including the following awards (probably not a complete list):

• In 1971, Knuth was the first recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the ACM.
• In 1974, Knuth received the Turing Award from the ACM.
• In 1979, Knuth won a National Medal of Science, given annually since 1959 as a Presidential Award to individuals deserving special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to knowledge.
• In 1992, Knuth became an associate of the French Academy of Sciences.
• In 1995, Knuth received the John von Neumann Medal from the IEEE, which is given for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.
• In 1996, Knuth was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, Japan’s highest private award for lifetime achievement.
• In 2003, Knuth was elected a foreign member of Britain's The Royal Society.

Sense of humor

Famous as a programmer, Knuth is known for his sense of humor.

• He pays a finder's fee of $2.56 for any typos/mistakes discovered in his books, because "256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar". (His bounty for errata in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, is, however, $3.16). According to an article in MIT's Technology Review, these reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies".
• Version numbers of his TeX software approach the transcendental number π, that is versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14 and so on. Version numbers of Metafont approach the number e similarly.
• He once warned users of his software, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
• All appendices in the Computers and Typesetting series have titles that begin with the letter identifying the appendix.
• TAOCP v3 (1973) has the index entry "Royalties, use of, 405". Page 405 has no explicit mention of royalties, but does contain a diagram of an "organ-pipe arrangement" in Figure 2. Apparently the purchase of the pipe organ in his home (see Personal below) was financed by royalties from TAOCP.
• From the Preface of Concrete Mathematics: When DEK taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time, he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that, contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, nor Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone-Čech compactification. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)
• Knuth published his first "scientific" article in a school magazine in 1957 under the title "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures." In it, he defined the fundamental unit of length as the thickness of MAD magazine #26, and named the fundamental unit of force "whatmeworry". MAD magazine bought the article and published it in the June 1957 issue.
• Knuth's first "mathematical" article was a short paper submitted to a "science talent search" contest for high-school seniors in 1955, and published in 1960, in which he discussed number systems where the radix was negative. He further generalized this to number systems where the radix was a complex number. In particular, he defined the quater-imaginary number system, which uses the imaginary number 2i as the base, having the unusual feature that every complex number can be represented with the digits 0, 1, 2, and 3, without a sign.
• Knuth's article about computational complexity of songs was reprinted twice in computer science journals.

Personal

Knuth is married to Jill Knuth, who published a book on liturgy titled Banner without Words, published by Resource Publications in 1986. They have two children. Knuth also loves to play the organ and has a two-story high pipe organ installed in his home. He is a member of Theta Chi fraternity.

In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (1991), ISBN 0-89579-252-4, in which he attempts to examine the Bible by a process of stratified random sampling, namely an analysis of chapter 3, verse 16 of each book. Each verse is accompanied by a rendering in calligraphic art, contributed by a group of calligraphers under the leadership of Hermann Zapf.