Donald Knuth: Difference between revisions

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Since 1990, Knuth has declined to use electronic mail, declaring it to be too inefficient and time-consuming.  Instead, a secretary monitors an email account on his behalf. He corresponds in "batch mode", such as one day every three months, to be sent by [[postal mail]].  In recent years, Knuth has given 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]].
Since 1990, Knuth has declined to use electronic mail, declaring it to be too inefficient and time-consuming.  Instead, a secretary monitors an email account on his behalf. He corresponds in "batch mode", such as one day every three months, to be sent by [[postal mail]].  In recent years, Knuth has given 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]].
==Sense of humor==
Famous as a [[programmer]], Knuth is known for his sense of humor.
*He pays a [[knuth reward check|finder's fee of $2.56]] for any typos/mistakes discovered in his books, because ''"256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar".'' (His bounty for errata in ''[[3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated]],'' is, however, $3.16). According to an article in [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]]'s ''Technology Review'', these reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies".<ref>[http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/99/09/ditlea0999.asp "Rewriting the Bible in 0's and 1's"] in the [[Technology Review]] of the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]]</ref>
*Version numbers of his [[TeX]] software approach the [[transcendental number]] [[pi|π]], that is versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14 and so on. Version numbers of [[Metafont]] approach the number [[E (mathematical constant)|''e'']] similarly.
*He once warned users of his software, ''"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."''<ref name="FAQ">[http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html "Frequently Asked Questions" at Stanford site]. Gives the pronunciation of his name as "Ka-NOOTH".</ref>
*All appendices in the [[Computers and Typesetting]] series have titles that begin with the letter identifying the appendix.
* TAOCP v3 (1973) has the index entry "Royalties, use of, 405". Page 405 has no explicit mention of royalties, but does contain a diagram of an "organ-pipe arrangement" in Figure 2. Apparently the purchase of the pipe organ in his home (see '''Personal''' below) was financed by royalties from TAOCP<ref name="pipeorgan">
{{cite web|url=http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html|
title=The Pipe Organ of Don and Jill Knuth|
publisher=Donald Knuth on his home page at Stanford University|
year=|
accessdate=2007-09-25}}
</ref>.
* From the Preface of ''Concrete Mathematics'': When DEK 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]], nor [[Stone's Embedding Theorem]], nor even the [[Stone-Čech compactification]]. (Several students from the [[civil engineering]] department got up and quietly left the room.)
*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|''MAD'' magazine]] #26, and named the fundamental unit of [[force]] "whatmeworry". ''MAD'' magazine bought the article and published it in the 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|quater-imaginary number 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 [[computational complexity of songs]] was reprinted twice in [[computer science]]  journals.


==Personal==
==Personal==

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Donald Ervin Knuth, born on January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is an acclaimed computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. As the author of the widely-cited, multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming [1], Knuth contributed significantly to the analysis of algorithms. He is also known for having created the TeX typesetting system and of the METAFONT font design system, and pioneering the concept of literate programming. He has accumulated a long list of honors and awards:

Academic achievements

In 1960, Knuth simultaneously earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree in mathematics from the Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University). In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, where he became a professor and began work on The Art of Computer Programming, originally planned as a seven-volume series.

In 1968, he joined the faculty of Stanford University and published the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming. In 1976, after producing the third volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth created the influential TeX and METAFONT tools as a result of his frustration with the electronic publishing tools used to provide input to photo-typesetters. In 1990, Stanford awarded Knuth the singular academic title of Professor of the Art of Computer Programming, which was revised to Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming upon his 1992 retirement from teaching at Stanford University. Knuth continued work on The Art of Computer Programming. By 2004, revised versions of the first three volumes had been re-issued, and Knuth continued working on volume four, excerpts of which are released periodically on his website.

Since 1990, Knuth has declined to use electronic mail, declaring it to be too inefficient and time-consuming. Instead, a secretary monitors an email account on his behalf. He corresponds in "batch mode", such as one day every three months, to be sent by postal mail. In recent years, Knuth has given 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.

Personal

Knuth is married to Jill Knuth[11], who published a book on liturgy titled Banner without Words, published by Resource Publications in 1986. They have two children. Knuth also loves to play the organ and has a two-story high pipe organ installed in his home[12]. He is a member of Theta Chi fraternity.

In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth 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 stratified random 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.

References

  1. ↑ "The Art of Computer Programming" (a description of volume contents). Donald Knuth, on his Stanford University home page. Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Awards given by the ACM. http://www.acm.org/ (Association for Computing Machinery). Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  3. ↑ Association for Computing Machinery. http://www.acm.org/.+Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  4. ↑ National Medal of Science recipients. http://www.nsf.gov/ (National Science Foundation). Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  5. ↑ French Academy of Sciences. http://www.academie-sciences.fr/.+Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  6. ↑ "Donald Knuth in French Academy of Sciences". http://www.stanford.edu/ (Stanford University). Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  7. ↑ IEEE John von Neumann medal. http://www.ieee.org/portal/site/iportals (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.). Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  8. ↑ Donald Knuth wins Kyoto Prize. http://www.stanford.edu/ (Stanford University). Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  9. ↑ List of Fellows and Foreign Members of The Royal Society. http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/.+Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  10. ↑ The Royal Society. http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/.+Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  11. ↑ Early picture
  12. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named pipeorgan
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