Donald Knuth

Father of the analysis of algorithms and creator of TeX.

Stanford University lists Knuth as a professor emeritus, and he was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1974.^[1] The description "father of the analysis of algorithms" has been applied to Knuth.^[1]

Quick Facts

Birth name: Donald Ervin Knuth
Born: 10 January 1938
Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
Spouse: Nancy Jill Carter
Children: 2
Field: Mathematics, Computer science
Workplaces: California Institute of Technology, Stanford University
Education: Case Western Reserve University (BS, MS), California Institute of Technology (PhD)

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

In eighth grade, Knuth won a contest by identifying over 4,500 words that could be formed from the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar".^[2][3] He enrolled at the Case Institute of Technology in 1956 on a physics scholarship.^[4] He created the TeX typesetting system after becoming frustrated with the quality of phototypesetting.^[5] A small printing business and bookkeeping instruction were the occupations of his father.^[6]

During his physics studies, Knuth encountered the IBM 650 and chose to rework its assembly and compiler code.^[7] A program assigning "values" to basketball players to aid his school's team in winning was developed by Knuth in 1958.^[8]

What the cited sources add

Knuth methodically leafed through his family's 2,000-page Funk & Wagnalls unabridged dictionary in the basement.^[9] The contest officials had identified approximately 2,000 words they could expect, but Knuth found more than 4,700.^[9] Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming as a graduate student in 1962.^[9] Knuth put aside The Art of Computer Programming for nearly a decade to develop TeX.^[9]

Knuth's interest in storytelling led him to develop a philosophy of literate programming.^[9] Knuth's Chinese name was given to him in 1977 by Frances Yao.^[10] Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."^[10]

References

Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Walden, "Donald E. Knuth - A.M. Turing Award Laureate"; Karp, "Combinatorics, Complexity, and Randomness", Communications of the ACM, February 1986, p. 98–109 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Advertisement, Minneapolis Star, February 13, 1952, page 59. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Feigenbaum, "Oral History of Donald Knuth", Computer History Museum, 2007; Shasha, "Out of their minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists", Springer, 1998, p. 90; Knuth, "Selected Papers on Fun and Games", Center for the Study of Language and Information—CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 192, 2011, p. 400 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Donald E. Knuth", Encyclopedia.com (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Knuth, "Digital Typography (Kyoto Prize Lecture, 1996)", 1997 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Molly Knight Raskin, "No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin--the Genius who Transformed the Internet", Da Capo Press, Incorporated, 2013, p. 61–62 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Koshy, "Discrete mathematics with applications", Academic Press, 2004, p. 244 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Donald Knuth" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lyons, "Donald Knuth, basketball and computers in sport", Clyde Street Archive, September 25, 2018; Koshy, "Discrete mathematics with applications", Academic Press, 2004, p. 244 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
D'Agostino, "The Computer Scientist Who Can't Stop Telling Stories", Quanta Magazine, 2020-04-16. facts only, no text reused. quantamagazine.org
Knuth, "Frequently Asked Questions", Home page. facts only, no text reused. cs.stanford.edu

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Donald Knuth (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.