Donald Knuth
Introduction


Donald Ervin Knuth (born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University.[3]

He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming.[4] Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".[5] He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process he also popularized the asymptotic notation. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

As a writer and scholar,[6] Knuth created the WEB and CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MIX/MMIX instruction set architectures. As a member of the academic and scientific community, Knuth is strongly opposed to the policy of granting software patents.[7] He has expressed his disagreement directly to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organization.[8]

Donald Knuth
Early Life


Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, where Donald enrolled, earning achievement awards. He applied his intelligence in unconventional ways, winning a contest when he was in eighth grade by finding over 4,500 words that could be formed from the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar"; the judges had only about 2,500 words on their master list. This won him a television set for his school and enough candy bars for his entire school.[9]

Donald Knuth
Education


Knuth had a difficult time choosing physics over music as his major at Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University). He also joined Beta Nu Chapter of the Theta Chi fraternity. While studying physics at the Case Institute of Technology, Knuth was introduced to the IBM 650, one of the early mainframes. After reading the computer's manual, Knuth decided to rewrite the assembly and compiler code for the machine used in his school, because he believed he could do it better.[10] In 1958, Knuth constructed a program based on the value of each player that could help his school basketball team win the league. This was so novel a proposition at the time that it got picked up and published by Newsweek and also covered by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News.[10] Knuth was one of the founding editors of the Engineering and Science Review, which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959.[11] He then switched from physics to mathematics, and in 1960 he received his bachelor of science degree, simultaneously being given a master of science degree by a special award of the faculty who considered his work exceptionally outstanding.[10][12]

In 1963, he earned a PhD in mathematics (his advisor was Marshall Hall) from the California Institute of Technology.[13]

Donald Knuth
Early Works


On receiving his PhD, Knuth joined Caltech's faculty as an associate professor.

He accepted a commission to write a book on computer programming language compilers. While working on this project, Knuth decided that he could not adequately treat the topic without first developing a fundamental theory of computer programming, which became The Art of Computer Programming. He originally planned to publish this as a single book. As Knuth developed his outline for the book, he concluded that he required six volumes, and then seven, to thoroughly cover the subject. He published the first volume in 1968.

Just before publishing the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth left Caltech to accept employment with the Institute for Defense Analyses' Communications Research Division, then situated on the Princeton University campus, which was performing mathematical research in cryptography to support the National Security Agency.

Knuth then left this position to join the Stanford University faculty

Donald Knuth
Writings


The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)

Computer science was then taking its first hesitant steps. "It was a totally new field," Knuth recalls, "with no real identity. And the standard of available publications was not that high. A lot of the papers coming out were quite simply wrong. [...] So one of my motivations was to put straight a story that had been very badly told."

After producing the third volume of his series in 1976, he expressed such frustration with the nascent state of the then newly developed electronic publishing tools (especially those that provided input to phototypesetters) that he took time out to work on typesetting and created the TeX and METAFONT tools.

As of 2013, the first three volumes and part one of volume four of his series have been published.[14] Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science 2nd ed., which originated with an expansion of the mathematical preliminaries section of Volume 1 of TAoCP, has also been published.

Other works

He is also the author of Surreal Numbers,[15] a mathematical novelette on John Conway's set theory construction of an alternate system of numbers. Instead of simply explaining the subject, the book seeks to show the development of the mathematics. Knuth wanted the book to prepare students for doing original, creative research.

In 1995, Knuth wrote the foreword to the book A=B by Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger.[16] Knuth is also an occasional contributor of language puzzles to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

Religious beliefs and work

In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth, a Lutheran,[17] is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated,[18] in which he examines the Bible by a process of systematic 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.

Subsequently he was invited to give a set of lectures on his 3:16 project, resulting in another book, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, where he published the lectures "God and Computer Science".

Donald Knuth
Awards


The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)

In 1971, Knuth was the recipient of the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. He has received various other awards including the Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the John von Neumann Medal, and the Kyoto Prize.

In recognition of Knuth's contributions to the field of computer science, in 1990 he was awarded the one-of-a-kind academic title of Professor of The Art of Computer Programming, which has since been revised to Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming.

Knuth was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. 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 foreign member of the Royal Society.

Knuth was elected as a Fellow (first class of Fellows) of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009 for his outstanding contributions to mathematics.[28] He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[29] In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[30]

Honors bestowed on Knuth include:

  • First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1971
  • Turing Award, 1974
  • Lester R. Ford Award, 1975[31] and 1993[32]
  • Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, 1978[33][34]
  • National Medal of Science, 1979
  • Franklin Medal, 1988
  • John von Neumann Medal, 1995
  • Harvey Prize from the Technion, 1995[35]
  • Kyoto Prize, 1996
  • Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his fundamental early work in the history of computing algorithms, development of the TeX typesetting language, and for major contributions to mathematics and computer science." 1998[1]
  • Katayanagi Prize, 2010[36]
  • BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Information and Communication Technologies, 2010[37]
  • Stanford University School of Engineering Hero Award, 2011[38]

Donald Knuth
References


All content from this site was retrived from the Donald Knuth page on Wikipedia. References for these sources can be found here.