Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist 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 published the first volume and joined the faculty of Stanford University.

After producing the third volume of his series in 1976, frustrated with the nascent state of the electronic publishing tools (esp. those which provided input to phototypesetters), Knuth worked on typesetting and created the influential TeX and METAFONT tools.

In 1992 he became an associate of the French Academy of Sciences. Also that year, he retired from regular research and teaching at Stanford University in order to finish The Art of Computer Programming. In 2003 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. As of 2004, the first three volumes of his series have been re-issued, and Knuth is currently working on volume four, excerpts of which are released periodically on his website. Meanwhile, Knuth gives 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.

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.

Awards and honors

• In 1971, Knuth was the recipient of the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.
• Turing Award
• National Medal of Science
• John von Neumann Medal
• Kyoto Prize
• In 1990, Stanford awarded Knuth the singular academic title of Professor of the Art of Computer Programming, which has since been revised to Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming.

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 interests

Knuth's hobbies include music, specifically playing the organ. He has a two-story high pipe organ installed in his home. Knuth disclaims any particular talent in the instrument.

He does not use e-mail, saying that he used it from about 1975 until January 1 1990, and that was enough for one lifetime. He finds it more efficient to respond to correspondence in "batch mode", such as one day every three months, to be sent by postal mail.

He 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.

He is a member of Theta Chi fraternity.