Donald Knuth

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Donald Ervin Knuth (Template:IPA<ref>"Frequently Asked Questions" at Stanford site gives the pronunciation as “Ka-NOOTH”.</ref>, born January 10, 1938) is a renowned computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University.

Knuth is best known as the author of the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most highly respected references in the computer science field. He practically created the field of rigorous analysis of algorithms, and made many seminal contributions to several branches of theoretical computer science. He is the creator of the T_EX typesetting system and of the METAFONT font design system, and pioneered the concept of literate programming.

He also has a Chinese name 高德纳 (pinyin: Gāo Dénà), given in 1977 by Frances Yao.<ref name="FAQ" />

1 Education and academic work
2 Knuth's humor
3 Personal
4 Awards
5 Works
6 References
7 Interviews, Q&A
8 See also
9 External links

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Education and academic work

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he received his bachelor's degree and master's degree in mathematics (simultaneously, his B.S. work being regarded as deserving a masters degree) in 1960 at the Case Institute of Technology (now the Case School of Engineering, a 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. That same year, he joined the faculty of Stanford University.

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. After producing the third volume of his series in 1976, he expressed such frustration with the antiquated state of publishing tools that he took time out to work on phototypesetting and created the T_EX and METAFONT tools.

In recognition of Knuth's contributions to the field of computer science, in 1990 he was awarded 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.

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 0895792524, 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.

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Knuth's humor

Knuth is a famous programmer known for his geek professional humor. Image:Knuth-check2.png

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".<ref>"Rewriting the Bible in 0's and 1's" in the Technology Review of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology</ref>
Version numbers of his T_EX 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."<ref name="FAQ" />
All appendixes 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.<ref>"Pipe Organ" at Stanford site</ref>
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.

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Personal

Knuth's hobbies include music, specifically playing the organ. He has a pipe organ installed in his home. Knuth disclaims any particular talent in the instrument, however. He does not use email, 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 <ref> Early picture</ref>, who published a book on liturgy titled Banner without Words, published by Resource Publications in 1986. They have two children.

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Awards

First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award - 1971
Turing Award - 1974
National Medal of Science - 1979
John von Neumann Medal - 1995
Kyoto Prize - 1996

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Works

A short list of his works<ref>A complete list is also available: "Books" at Stanford site</ref> can be found on Donald Knuth's homepage):

Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1–3

Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd edition), 1997. ISBN 0201896834
Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms (3rd Edition), 1997. ISBN 0201896842
Volume 3: Sorting and Searching (2nd Edition), 1998. ISBN 0201896850
Volume 4: Combinatorial Algorithms, in preparation
Volume 5: Syntactic Algorithms, in preparation, estimated to be ready in 2010

Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, fascicles:

Volume 1, Fascicle 1: MMIX — A RISC Computer for the New Millennium, 2005. ISBN 0201853922
Volume 4, Fascicle 2: Generating All Tuples and Permutations, 2005. ISBN 0201853930
Volume 4, Fascicle 3: Generating All Combinations and Partitions, 2005. ISBN 0201853949
Volume 4, Fascicle 4: Generating All Trees -- History of Combinatorial Generation, 2006. ISBN 0321335708

Donald E. Knuth, The TeXbook (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley), 1984. ISBN 0201134489
Donald E. Knuth, The METAFONTbook (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley), 1986. ISBN 0201134446
Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, Oren Patashnik, Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, 2nd edition (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley), 1994. ISBN 0201558025
Selected papers series:<ref>"Selected Papers" at Stanford site</ref>

Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes), 1992. ISBN 0937073806
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information - CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 59), 1996. ISBN 1881526917
Donald E. Knuth, Digital Typography (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information - CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 78), 1999. ISBN 1575860104
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information - CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 102), 2000. ISBN 1575862123
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Languages (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information - CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 139), 2003. ISBN 1575863812 (cloth), ISBN 1575863820 (paperback)
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Discrete Mathematics (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information - CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 106), 2003. ISBN 1575862492 (cloth), ISBN 1575862484 (paperback)
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Design of Algorithms (scheduled for publication in 2007)
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Fun and Games (scheduled for publication in 2007)

Donald E. Knuth, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions), 1990. ISBN 0895792524
Donald E. Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Center for the Study of Language and Information - CSLI Lecture Notes no 136), 2001. ISBN 157586326X

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