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Donald Knuth

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Donald Ervin Knuth
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(born Jan. 10, 1938, Milwaukee, Wis., U.S.) U.S. computer scientist. Knuth earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1963 from the California Institute of Technology. A pioneer in computer science, he took time out during the 1970s from writing his highly acclaimed multivolume The Art of Computer Programming in order to develop TeX, a document-preparation system. Because of its precise control of special characters and mathematical formulas, TeX and its variants soon became standard for submitting typeset-ready scientific and mathematical research papers for publication. He has received many awards and honours, including the Kyoto Prize (1996), the Turing Award (1974), and the National Medal of Science (1979).

For more information on Donald Ervin Knuth, visit Britannica.com.

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Scientist: Donald Ervin Knuth
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American computer programmer (1938–)

Knuth showed an early interest in words and numbers. While in the 8th grade he entered a competition to find as many words as possible from the letters in the phrase “Ziegler's Giant Bar” and came up with 4500 – some 2000 more than the judges had compiled. At first he considered devoting himself to music but opted for mathematics and physics, which he studied at Case Institute for Technology, Cleveland, Ohio, and at the California Institute of Technology, where he gained his PhD in 1963. He remained at Cal Tech until 1968, when he moved to Stanford as professor of computer science. He resigned in 1992 to concentrate on writing.

In the 1960s Knuth began compiling what is now widely recognized as the fundamental work on computer science, The Art of Computer Programming. It is planned for seven volumes – the first three have already appeared: Fundamental Algorithms (1968), Seminumerical Algorithms (1969), and Sorting and Searching (1973).

Having completed the first three volumes, Knuth spent several years exploring typography. He had long been interested in printing and it occurred to him in 1977 that “printing was a computer science problem.” The result was the much-studied book Tex and Metafont (1979) and the five-volume Computers and Typesetting (1986). Metafont allows the user to construct a custom-designed typesetting font. Tex (which Knuth prints as TEX, and which is pronounced ‘tek’) is an automatic typesetting and page makeup program. It is widely available and popular with academic users.

Knuth has said that he intends to return to music once he has completed all seven volumes of his computer book – his house is built around a two-storey pipe organ that he designed himself. He has also written a remarkable science-fiction novel, Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned On to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness (1974), based on a number system invented by the mathematician John Conway.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Donald Ervin Knuth
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Knuth, Donald Ervin (nūth, kənūth'), 1938-, American mathematician and computer scientist, b. Milwaukee, Wis., grad. Case Institute of Technology (B.S. and M.S., 1960) and California Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1963). While still a graduate student, Knuth was contracted to write a book about the construction of computer compilers (see programming language). What he wrote instead turned into his monumental series The Art of Computer Programming (3 vol., 1968-), an overview of programming algorithms, each described with mathematical rigor, that has been translated into six languages. Disappointed with the state of computer typesetting, Knuth developed a typesetting program that has become the standard for mathematics and physics. He taught at the California Institute of Technology from 1962 until 1968, when he joined the faculty at Stanford Univ., becoming professor emeritus in 1993. His writings include Surreal Numbers (1974), Literate Programming (1992), and Digital Typography (1999).
Wikipedia: Donald Knuth
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Donald Ervin Knuth

Donald Knuth at a reception for the Open Content Alliance, October 25, 2005
Born January 10, 1938 (1938-01-10) (age 71)
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
Residence U.S.
Nationality American
Fields 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
Scott Kim
Vaughan Pratt
Robert Sedgewick
Jeffrey Vitter
Bernard Marcel Mont-Reynaud
Known for The Art of Computer Programming
TeX, METAFONT
Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm
Knuth–Bendix completion algorithm
MMIX
Notable awards John von Neumann Medal (1995)
Turing Award (1974)
Kyoto Prize (1996)
Religious stance Lutheran

Donald Ervin Knuth (pronounced /kəˈnuːθ/[1]) (born January 10, 1938) is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming[2] at Stanford University.

Author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming ("TAOCP"),[3] Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms, contributing to the development of, and systematizing formal mathematical techniques for, the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms, and in the process popularizing 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.

A prolific writer and scholar,[4] Knuth created the WEB/CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MMIX instruction set architecture.

Contents

Education and academic work

Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, which he attended. He was an excellent student, 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." This won him a television set for his school and a candy bar for everyone in his class.[5]

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 Theta Chi Fraternity. 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. At Case, he managed the basketball team and applied his talents by constructing a formula for the value of each player. This novel approach was covered by Newsweek and by Walter Cronkite on the CBS television network.[6]

While doing graduate studies, Knuth worked as a consultant, writing compilers for different computers. In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (advisor: Marshall Hall) from the California Institute of Technology, where he became a professor and began work on 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).

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 nascent state of the then newly developed electronic publishing tools (esp. those which provided input to phototypesetters) that he took time out to work on typesetting and created the TeX and METAFONT tools.

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. 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.[7] 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, a devout Lutheran,[8] is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (1991), ISBN 0-89579-252-4, in which he attempts to examine 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.

He is also the author of Surreal Numbers (1974) ISBN 0-201-03812-9, 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.

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.[9]

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.[10]

Awards

Knuth’s 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 such checks in 2008 due to bank fraud, and instead now gives each error finder a publicly listed balance in his fictitious "Bank of San Serriffe".[12][13]
  • Version numbers of his TeX software approach the transcendental number π, in that versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14. 3.141, and so on. Version numbers of Metafont approach the important number e similarly.
  • He once warned a correspondent, “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”[1]
  • All appendices in the Computers and Typesetting series have titles that begin with the letter identifying the appendix.
  • TAOCP v3 (First Edition) has the index entry “Royalties, use of, 405”. Page 405 has no explicit mention of royalties, but however does contain a diagram of an “organ-pipe arrangement” in Figure 2. Apparently the purchase of the pipe organ in his home was financed by royalties from TAOCP.[14] (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 [ Aggregate functions or Aggregate (composite) ], not 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.)” (Concrete and aggregates are important topics in civil engineering.)
Knuth's "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures"
  • 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 explain the concept, Knuth intentionally referred 'Circular definition' and 'Definition, circular' to each other in the index of The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 1.

Works

A short list of his works:[15]

  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, 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
  1. Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming (Center for the Study of Language and Information — Lecture Notes), 1992. ISBN 0-937073-80-6
  2. 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 1-881526-91-7
  3. Donald E. Knuth, Digital Typography (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information — CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 78), 1999. ISBN 1-57586-010-4
  4. 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 1-57586-212-3
  5. 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 1-57586-381-2 (cloth), ISBN 1-57586-382-0 (paperback)
  6. 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 1-57586-249-2 (cloth), 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), 2009. ISBN 1-57586-583-1 (cloth), ISBN 1-57586-582-3 (paperback)
  8. Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Fun and Games (publication planned in late 2010)

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Frequently Asked Questions" at Stanford site. Gives the pronunciation of his name as "Ka-NOOTH".
  2. ^ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/.
  3. ^ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html.
  4. ^ Knuth's CV
  5. ^ Dennis Elliott Shasha; Cathy A. Lazere (1998), Out of their minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists, Springer, p. 90, ISBN 9780387982694, http://books.google.com/books?id=-0tDZX3z-8UC&pg=PA90 
  6. ^ Kenneth H. Rosen, Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications 4th Ed., McGraw-Hill. 1999. p.82
  7. ^ [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html
  8. ^ Love at First Byte. Stanford Magazine, May/June 2006.
  9. ^ Knuth, Donald Knuth versus Email last changed on 2005-09-23, Retrieved on 2008-12-29.
  10. ^ Great Lives - Donald Knuth, Coping with cancer.
  11. ^ http://www.admin.technion.ac.il/harvey/1995-2.html
  12. ^ “Rewriting the Bible in 0’s and 1’s” in the Technology Review of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  13. ^ Sparkes, Matthew (2008-10-31). "Knuth launches The Bank of San Serriffe". PC Pro. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/10/31/knuth-launches-the-bank-of-san-serriffe/. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
  14. ^ “Pipe Organ” at Stanford site
  15. ^ A complete list is also available: "Books" at Stanford site
  16. ^ "Selected Papers" at Stanford site

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v • d • e
A. M. Turing Award laureates

Alan Perlis (1966) · Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1967) · Richard Hamming (1968) · Marvin Minsky (1969) · James H. Wilkinson (1970) · John McCarthy (1971) · Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972) · Charles Bachman (1973) · Donald Knuth (1974) · Allen Newell / Herbert Simon (1975) · Michael O. Rabin / Dana Scott (1976) · John Backus (1977) · Robert Floyd (1978) · Kenneth E. Iverson (1979) · C. A. R. Hoare (1980) · Edgar F. Codd (1981) · Stephen Cook (1982) · Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie (1983) · Niklaus Wirth (1984) · Richard Karp (1985) · John Hopcroft / Robert Tarjan (1986) · John Cocke (1987) · Ivan Sutherland (1988) · William Kahan (1989) · Fernando J. Corbató (1990) · Robin Milner (1991) · Butler Lampson (1992) · Juris Hartmanis / Richard Stearns (1993) · Edward Feigenbaum / Raj Reddy (1994) · Manuel Blum (1995) · Amir Pnueli (1996) · Douglas Engelbart (1997) · Jim Gray (1998) · Fred Brooks (1999) · Andrew Yao (2000) · Ole-Johan Dahl / Kristen Nygaard (2001) · Ron Rivest / Adi Shamir / Leonard Adleman (2002) · Alan Kay (2003) · Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn (2004) · Peter Naur (2005) · Frances E. Allen (2006) · Edmund M. Clarke / E. Allen Emerson / Joseph Sifakis (2007) · Barbara Liskov (2008)
v • d • e
National Medal of Science laureates
 
Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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