Donald Knuth and the Art of Programming

Donald Knuth and the Art of Programming.

On January 10 1938 computer scientist Donald Knuth developer of the seminal computer science textbooks 'The Art of Computer Programming', was born. He is also widely known for his development of the TeX typesetting framework and the Metafont font definition language. Actually, Donald Knuth is one of my personal heroes in computer science. The very day I started to study this subject, his textbooks had already become a sort of 'holy bible' when it comes to algorithms and esp. the analysis of algorithms i.e. the very heart of computer science. About the person behind the book, I almost knew next to nothing... Donald Ervin 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". However, 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. At high school Knuth's interests were more directed towards music than they were to mathematics. His musical interests involved both playing and composing music and he decided at that stage that he would study music after graduating from high school. Knuth played the saxophone and later the tuba in his school band. However, in 1956 he graduated from High School with the highest grade point average that anyone had ever achieved at his school.He decided to take physics as his major at Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University), where he was introduced to the IBM 650 computer, one of the early mainframes. After reading the computer's manual, he 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 the autumn of 1960 Knuth entered the California Institute of Technology and, in June 1963 he was awarded a Ph.D in mathematics for his thesis 'Finite semifields and projective planes'. Besides, knowledge of his computing expertise was so well established by 1962 that, although he was still a doctoral student at the time, Addison-Wesley approached him and asked him to write a text on compilers. He began to work at CalTech as associate professor and the commission from Addyson-Wesley turned out into the writing of his seminal multivolume book 'The Art of Computer Programming'. This work was originally planned to be a single book, and then planned as a six- and then seven-volume series. In 1968 just before he published the first volume, Knuth was appointed as Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. After producing the third volume of his book 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 2012 the first three volumes and part one of volume four of his series have been published. At yovisto, you can watch Prof. Donald Knuth himself in his 17th annual Christmas Tree lecture at Stanford University about 'Bayesian trees and BDDs'.

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