Donald Knuth

Lore & Background

Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning. He describes his heritage as 'Midwestern Lutheran German'. His father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping. While a student at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, in eighth grade he entered a contest to find the number of words that the letters in 'Ziegler's Giant Bar' could be rearranged to create; he identified over 4,500 words, winning the contest. He received a scholarship in physics to the Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University), enrolling in 1956. He joined the Beta Nu Chapter of the Theta Chi fraternity. While studying physics, he was introduced to the IBM 650. In 1958, he created a program to help his school's basketball team win its games, assigning 'values' to players to gauge their probability of scoring points. He was one of the founding editors of the Case Institute's Engineering and Science Review, which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959. He switched from physics to mathematics, and received two degrees from Case in 1960: his Bachelor of Science, and simultaneously a master of science by a special award of the faculty. At the end of his senior year at Case in 1960, Knuth proposed to Burroughs Corporation to write an ALGOL compiler for the B205 for $5,500. The proposal was accepted. In 1963, with mathematician Marshall Hall as his adviser, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, with a thesis titled 'Finite Semifields and Projective Planes'. After receiving his PhD, Knuth joined Caltech's faculty as an assistant professor. He became consultant to Burroughs Corporation, joining the Product Planning Department. He turned down a $100,000 contract to write compilers at Green Tree Corporation, deciding instead to optimize income and continue at Caltech and Burroughs. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship and Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship, but they had the condition that the recipient could not do anything else but study as a graduate student, so he would not be able to continue as a consultant to Burroughs. He chose to turn down the fellowships and continued with Burroughs. In summer 1962, he wrote a FORTRAN compiler for Univac, but considered that 'I sold my soul to the devil' to write a FORTRAN compiler. After graduating, Knuth returned

Reader's Guide

Knuth is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. 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. He strongly opposes the granting of software patents, and has expressed his opinion to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organisation. From 1972 to 1973, Knuth spent a year at the University of Oslo among people such as Ole-Johan Dahl. This is where he had originally intended to write the seventh volume in his book series, which was to deal with programming languages. But Knuth had finished only the first two volumes when he came to Oslo, and thus spent the year on the third volume, next to teaching. The third volume came out just after Knuth returned to Stanford in 1973. Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science originated with an expansion of the mathematical preliminaries section of Volume 1 of TAoCP. Knuth found that there were mathematical tools necessary for Volume 1, but missing from his repertoire, and decided that a course introducing those tools to computer science students would be useful. Knuth introduced the course at Stanford in 1970. Course notes developed by Oren Patashnik evolved into the 1988 text, with authors Ronald Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.

Did You Know?

• Knuth turned down a $100,000 contract to write compilers at Green Tree Corporation, not Burroughs Corporation.
• In summer 1962, Knuth wrote a FORTRAN compiler for Univac, which he considered 'I sold my soul to the devil.'
• Knuth's father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Donald Ervin Knuth (born 10 January 1938) is an American computer scientist, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, and winner of the 1974 Turing Award." — Donald Knuth "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." — Donald Knuth "I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level." — Donald Knuth "The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large." — Donald Knuth