Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth
Donald Knuth at a reception for the Open Content Alliance, October 25, 2005
Born	January 10, 1938 (1938-01-10) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics Computer science
Institutions	Stanford University
Alma mater	Case Institute of Technology California Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Marshall Hall, Jr.
Doctoral students	Leonidas J. Guibas Michael Fredman Scott Kim Vaughan Pratt Robert Sedgewick Jeffrey Vitter Andrei Broder Bernard Marcel Mont-Reynaud
Known for	The Art of Computer Programming TeX, METAFONT Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm Knuth–Bendix completion algorithm MMIX
Notable awards	Turing Award (1974) John von Neumann Medal (1995) Harvey Prize (1995) Kyoto Prize (1996)

Donald Ervin Knuth ( /kəˈnuːθ/ kə-nooth; born January 10, 1938) is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.

He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms. 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, Knuth created the WEB/CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MIX/MMIX instruction set architectures.

Early education

Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, where he 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 a candy bar for everyone in his class.

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. 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. Knuth was one of the founding editors of the Engineering and Science Review which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959. He then switched from physics to mathematics, and in 1960 he received his bachelor of science degree, simultaneously receiving his master of science degree by a special award of the faculty who considered his work outstanding.

In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (advisor: Marshall Hall) from the California Institute of Technology, and began to work there as associate professor and began work on The Art of Computer Programming. He had initially accepted a commission to write a book on compilers which would later become the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming. Originally planned to be a single book, and then planned as a six- and then seven-volume series. In 1968, he published the first volume. That same year, he joined the faculty of Stanford University, having turned down a job offer from the National Security Agency (NSA).^{[citation needed]}

Writings

The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)

Main article: The Art of Computer Programming

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 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.

Other works

He is also the author of Surreal Numbers, 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.

Religious beliefs and work

In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth, a Lutheran, is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, 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.

Miscellaneous

No email

On January 1, 1990, Knuth announced to his colleagues that he would no longer have an e-mail address, so that he might concentrate on his work.

Health concerns

In 2006, Knuth was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent surgery in December that year and started "a little bit of radiation therapy […] as a precaution but the prognosis looks pretty good," as he reported in his video autobiography.

Computer Musings

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 and an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College.

Humor

Knuth is known for his "professional humor".

One of Knuth’s reward checks

• He used to pay a finder’s fee of $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because "256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar", and $0.32 for "valuable suggestions". (His bounty for errata in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, is, however, $3.16). According to an article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review, these Knuth reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies". Knuth had to stop sending real checks in 2008 due to bank fraud, and instead now gives each error finder a "certificate of deposit" from a publicly listed balance in his fictitious "Bank of San Serriffe".
• Version numbers of his TeX software approach the number π, in that versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14. 3.141, and so on. Similarly, version numbers of Metafont approach the base of the natural logarithm, e.
• He once warned a correspondent, "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.
• The Art of Computer Programming, volume 3 (1st ed.) has an index entry "Royalties, use of, 405". Page 405 has no explicit mention of royalties, but does contain a diagram of an "organ-pipe arrangement". Apparently the purchase of the pipe organ in his home was financed by royalties from the book. (In the second edition of the work, the relevant page is 407.)
• The preface of Concrete Mathematics includes the following anecdote: "When Knuth 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 theorem. (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 #33, 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 base 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 the computational complexity of songs, "The Complexity of Songs", was reprinted twice in computer science journals.
• To demonstrate the concept, Knuth intentionally referred "Circular definition" and "Definition, circular" to each other in the index of The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 1.
• At the TUG 2010 Conference, Knuth announced an XML-based successor to TeX, titled "iTeX" (pronounced [iː˨˩˦tɛks˧˥], with a bell ringing), which would support features such as arbitrarily scaled irrational units, 3D printing, animation, and stereographic sound.

Awards

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.

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. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Honors bestowed on Knuth include:

• First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1971
• Turing Award, 1974
• National Medal of Science, 1979
• Franklin Medal, 1988
• John von Neumann Medal, 1995
• Harvey Prize from the Technion, 1995
• Kyoto Prize, 1996
• Katayanagi Prize, 2010
• BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, 2010
• Stanford University School of Engineering Hero Award, 2011

Works

A short list of his works:

• Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1–4, Addison-Wesley Professional

1. Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd edition), 1997. Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-201-89683-4
2. Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms (3rd Edition), 1997. Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-201-89684-2
3. Volume 3: Sorting and Searching (2nd Edition), 1998. Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-201-89685-0
4. Volume 4: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1, 2011. Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-201-03804-8
5. Volume 4: Combinatorial Algorithms (remainder), in preparation

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

1. Volume 1, Fascicle 1: MMIX—A RISC Computer for the New Millennium, 2005. ISBN 0-201-85392-2
2. Volume 4, Fascicle 0: Introduction to Combinatorial Algorithms and Boolean Functions. 2008. ISBN 0-321-53496-4
3. Volume 4, Fascicle 1: Bitwise Tricks & Techniques; Binary Decision Diagrams. 2009. ISBN 0-321-58050-8
4. Volume 4, Fascicle 2: Generating All Tuples and Permutations, 2005. ISBN 0-201-85393-0
5. Volume 4, Fascicle 3: Generating All Combinations and Partitions, 2005. ISBN 0-201-85394-9
6. Volume 4, Fascicle 4: Generating All Trees—History of Combinatorial Generation, 2006. ISBN 0-321-33570-8

• Donald E. Knuth, Computers & Typesetting:

1. Volume A, The TeXbook (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1984), x+483pp. ISBN 0-201-13447-0
2. Volume B, TeX: The Program (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986), xviii+600pp. ISBN 0-201-13437-3
3. Volume C, The METAFONTbook (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986), xii+361pp. ISBN 0-201-13445-4
4. Volume D, METAFONT: The Program (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986), xviii+566pp. ISBN 0-201-13438-1
5. Volume E, Computer Modern Typefaces (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986), xvi+588pp.

• Knuth, Donald E. Selected papers series
• Graham, Ronald L.; Knuth, Donald E.; Patashnik, Oren (1994). Concrete mathematics: A foundation for computer science (Second ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. pp. xiv+657. ISBN 0-201-55802-5. MR1397498. 
• Donald E. Knuth, Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness. 1974, ISBN 0-201-03812-9. More information can be found at the book's official homepage
• Donald E. Knuth, The Stanford GraphBase: A Platform for Combinatorial Computing (New York, ACM Press) 1993. second paperback printing 2009. ISBN 0-321-60632-9
• Donald E. Knuth, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions), 1990. ISBN 0-89579-252-4
• 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 1-57586-326-X

See also

• Asymptotic notation
• Dancing Links
• Knuth–Bendix completion algorithm
• Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm
• Knuth -yllion
• Knuth Prize
• Knuth shuffle
• Knuth's up-arrow notation
• Man or boy test
• Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence
• The Complexity of Songs
• Trabb Pardo–Knuth algorithm
• List of science and religion scholars

External links

• Donald Knuth’s home page at Stanford University.
• Oral history interview with Donald E. Knuth at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Knuth discusses software patenting, structured programming, collaboration and his development of TeX. The oral history discusses the writing of The Art of Computer Programming as well as his early education and Lutheran heritage.
• “Love at First Byte,” Kara Platoni, with photography by Timothy Archibald, STANFORD Magazine, May/June 2006. A retrospective of Knuth’s life and work, with some rare, recent photos.
• Beta Nu Chapter of Theta Chi Fraternity
• Donald Knuth at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Donald Knuth", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Knuth.html .
• Donald Knuth: Leonard Euler of Computer Science (Softpanorama)
• Videos of presentations w/ Donald Knuth
• The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures
• Finite Semifields and Projective Planes – Donald Knuth's Ph.D. dissertation
• Letter sent in February 1994 by Donald Knuth to the Patent and Trademark Office
• Donald E. Knuth, "Algorithmic Themes", in AMS History of Mathematics, Volume 1: A Century of Mathematics in America, AMS, Providence, RI, 1988.
• Donald E. Knuth, Email
• Oral History of Donald Knuth
• Donald Knuth telling his life story at Web of Stories (video)
• Waychoff, Richard, "Stories of the B5000 and People Who Were There", September 27, 1979. Cf. pp. 6–8, "The Summer of 1960 (Time spent with don knuth)".
• Works by or about Donald Knuth in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Interviews and lectures

• Donald Knuth's Stanford lectures archive
• Video of Donald Knuth's Christmas tree lecture 2010
• Video of Donald Knuth's talk at Google, March 16, 2009 – On interactions between faith and science
• TUG'95 (St Petersburg, FL, USA) Questions and answers with Prof. Donald E. Knuth. TUGboat 17 (1), 1996
• Woehr, J. An interview with Donald Knuth Dr. Dobb's Journal, April 1996, p. 16–22.
• Donald Knuth on The Art of Computer Programming Addison-Wesley Innovations, 1996
• Questions and Answers with Prof. Donald E. Knuth. Czech TUG, Charles University, Prague, 1996
• Knuth meets NTG members, Amsterdam, March 13, 1996.
• Knuth Comments on Code, Byte magazine, September 1996.
• Donald Knuth: A life's work in the art of programming Amazon.com, 1997.
• U.K. TUG, Oxford, September 12, 1999: Question & Answer Session with Donald Knuth. TUGboat, 22 (1/2), 2001.
• Dr. Dobb's Audio & Video Archive of Knuth's MMIX and God & Computers Lectures @ MIT, Fall 1999
• Donald Knuth: MMIX, A RISC Computer for the New Millennium. Audio recording of a presentation at the monthly meeting of the Boston ACM December 30, 1999
• Wallace, Mark. The art of Don E. Knuth Interview on salon.com, 1999.
• Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About – Lecture 1: Introduction, October 6, 1999
• Advogato, 2000, also available as HTML Version
• AMS, 2001
• Oslo, 2002
• c't, 2002 (in German)
• NZZ Folio, 2002 (in German)
• Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science. Audio interview by David Kestenbaum on National Public Radio; or Transcript, March 14, 2005.
• Free Software Magazine interview by Gianluca Pignalberi, August 2005.
• InformIT Interview by Andrew Binstock, April 2008.
• Communications of the ACM, Vol.51,7 pp. 35–39, Interview, part 1 by Len Shustek, July 2008 (An edited extract from the 2007 interview above.)