Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth at a reception for the Open Content Alliance, October 25, 2005
Born	Donald Ervin Knuth (1938-01-10) January 10, 1938 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US
Other names	高德纳
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics Computer science
Institutions	Stanford University
Alma mater	Case Institute of Technology (B.S.; M.S., 1960) California Institute of Technology (PhD, 1963)
Thesis	Finite Semifields and Projective Planes (1963)
Doctoral advisor	Marshall Hall, Jr.
Doctoral students	Leonidas J. Guibas Michael Fredman Scott Kim Vaughan Pratt Robert Sedgewick Jeffrey Vitter Andrei Broder
Known for	The Art of Computer Programming TeX, METAFONT Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm Knuth–Bendix completion algorithm MMIX Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence
Notable awards	Grace Murray Hopper Award (1971) Turing Award (1974) National Medal of Science (1979) John von Neumann Medal (1995) Harvey Prize (1995) Kyoto Prize (1996) Computer History Museum Fellow (1998) ForMemRS (2003) Faraday Medal (2011) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2010) Turing Lecture (2011)
Website cs.stanford.edu/~uno

Donald Ervin Knuth (/kəˈnuːθ/ kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University.

He is the author of the 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 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. He has expressed his disagreement directly to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organization.

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.

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 being given a master of science degree by a special award of the faculty who considered his work exceptionally outstanding.

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

Early work

After 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.

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 2013, the first three volumes and part one of volume four of his series have been published. 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, 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. 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, 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.

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

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 called Computer Musings. He is a visiting professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom and an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College.

Humor

One of Knuth's reward checks

"Nested parens"—Donald Knuth and Jacob Appelbaum and Donald Knuth

Knuth 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". 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".

He once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

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 No. 26, and named the fundamental unit of force "whatmeworry." Mad published the article in issue No. 33 (June 1957).

To demonstrate the concept, Knuth intentionally referred "Circular definition" and "Definition, circular" to each other in the index of The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 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 stereophonic sound.

Awards and honors

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. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2003.

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. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Other awards and honors include:

• First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1971
• Turing Award, 1974
• Lester R. Ford Award, 1975 and 1993
• Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, 1978
• National Medal of Science, 1979
• Franklin Medal, 1988
• John von Neumann Medal, 1995
• Harvey Prize from the Technion, 1995
• 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
• Katayanagi Prize, 2010
• BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Information and Communication Technologies, 2010
• Turing Lecture, 2011
• Stanford University School of Engineering Hero Award, 2011

Publications

A short list of his publications:

The Art of Computer Programming

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2. .
3. .
4. .
5. .
6. .
7. .
8. .
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10. .
11. .

Computers and Typesetting

All books are hardcover unless otherwise noted.

1. , x+483pp.
2. (softcover).
3. , xviii+600pp.
4. , xii+361pp.
5. (softcover).
6. , xviii+566pp.
7. , xvi+588pp.
8. .

Selected papers

5. , ISBN 1-57586-382-0 (paperback)
6. , ISBN 1-57586-248-4 (paperback)
7. Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Design of Algorithms (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information—CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 191), 2010. ISBN 1-57586-583-1 (cloth), ISBN 1-57586-582-3 (paperback)
8. Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Fun and Games (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information—CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 192), 2011. ISBN 978-1-57586-585-0 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57586-584-3 (paperback)
9. Donald E. Knuth, Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information—CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 202), 2011. ISBN 978-1-57586-635-2 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57586-634-5 (paperback)

• xiv+657 pp.
• 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

Gallery

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  Knuth, March 4, 2005

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  Knuth in front of statue St. Mesrop Mashtots, Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, June 9, 2006

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  Shustek, Russell, Alcorn, Knuth, Wozniak, Mathews, Allen, CHM 2011

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  Knuth and Steve Wozniak, CHM 2011

See also

• Asymptotic notation
• Attribute grammar
• 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

Bibliography

• .
• . A retrospective of Knuth's life and work, with some rare, recent photos.

External links

• Donald Knuth's home page at Stanford University.
• Donald Knuth at DMOZ
• . Knuth discusses software patenting, structured programming, collaboration and his development of TeX.
• Donald Knuth at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• .
• Works by or about Donald Knuth in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• .
• List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
• Donald Knuth's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
• Interview at Stanford University "Donald Knuth – All Questions Answered" on YouTube