57 Facts About Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician.

Donald Knuth is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.

Donald Knuth is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming.

Donald Knuth contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.

Donald Knuth strongly opposes the granting of software patents, and has expressed his opinion to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organisation.

Donald Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning.

Donald Knuth's father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping.

Donald Knuth received a scholarship in physics to the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, enrolling in 1956.

Donald Knuth joined the Beta Nu Chapter of the Theta Chi fraternity.

In 1958, Donald Knuth created a program to help his school's basketball team win its games.

Donald Knuth assigned "values" to players in order to gauge their probability of scoring points, a novel approach that Newsweek and CBS Evening News later reported on.

Donald Knuth 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.

Donald Knuth then 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, who considered his work exceptionally outstanding.

In 1963, after receiving his PhD, Donald Knuth joined Caltech's faculty as an assistant professor.

Donald Knuth was offered a $100,000 contract to write compilers at Green Tree Corporation but turned it down making a decision not to optimize income and continued at Caltech and Burroughs.

Donald Knuth received a National Science Foundation Fellowship and Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship but they had the condition that you could not do anything else but study as a graduate student so he would not be able to continue as a consultant to Burroughs.

Donald Knuth chose to turn down the fellowships and continued with Burroughs.

Donald Knuth attended a conference in Norway in May, 1967 organised by the people who invented the Simula language.

Donald Knuth had a long association with Burroughs as a consultant from 1960 to 1968 until his move into more academic work at Stanford in 1969.

In 1962, Donald Knuth accepted a commission from Addison-Wesley to write a book on computer programming language compilers.

Donald Knuth originally planned to publish this as a single book, but as he developed his outline for the book, he concluded that he required six volumes, and then seven, to thoroughly cover the subject.

Just before publishing the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth left Caltech to accept employment with the Institute for Defense Analyses' Communications Research Division, then situated on the Princeton campus, which was performing mathematical research in cryptography to support the National Security Agency.

In 1967, Donald Knuth attended a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference and someone asked what he did.

In 1969, Donald Knuth left his position at Princeton to join the Stanford University faculty, where he became Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science in 1977.

Donald Knuth became Professor of The Art of Computer Programming in 1990, and has been emeritus since 1993.

From 1972 to 1973, Donald Knuth spent a year at the University of Oslo among people such as Ole-Johan Dahl.

The third volume came out just after Donald Knuth returned to Stanford in 1973.

Donald 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.

Donald Knuth is the author of Surreal Numbers, a mathematical novelette on John Horton Conway's set theory construction of an alternate system of numbers.

Donald Knuth wanted the book to prepare students for doing original, creative research.

In 1995, Donald Knuth wrote the foreword to the book A=B by Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger.

Donald Knuth occasionally contributes language puzzles to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

Donald Knuth contributed articles to the Journal of Recreational Mathematics beginning in the 1960s, and was acknowledged as a major contributor in Joseph Madachy's Mathematics on Vacation.

Donald Knuth appears in a number of Numberphile and Computerphile videos on YouTube, where he discusses topics from writing Surreal Numbers to why he does not use email.

Donald Knuth had proposed the name "algorithmics" as a better name for the discipline of computer science.

Donald Knuth was invited to give a set of lectures at MIT on the views on religion and computer science behind his 3:16 project, resulting in another book, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, where he published the lectures God and Computer Science.

Donald Knuth strongly opposes granting software patents to trivial solutions that should be obvious, but has expressed more nuanced views for nontrivial solutions such as the interior-point method of linear programming.

Donald Knuth has expressed his disagreement directly to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organisation.

Donald Knuth became so frustrated with the inability of the latter system to approach the quality of the previous volumes, which were typeset using the older system, that he took time out to work on digital typesetting and created TeX and Metafont.

Donald Knuth embodied the idea of literate programming in the WEB system.

Donald Knuth used WEB to program TeX and METAFONT, and published both programs as books, both originally published the same year: TeX: The Program ; and METAFONT: The Program.

Donald Knuth married Nancy Jill Carter on 24 June 1961, while he was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.

Donald Knuth gives informal lectures a few times a year at Stanford University, which he calls "Computer Musings".

Donald Knuth was a visiting professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom until 2017 and an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College.

Donald Knuth was given this name in 1977 by Frances Yao shortly before making a three-week trip to China.

In 1989, his Chinese name was placed atop the Journal of Computer Science and Technology header, which Donald Knuth says "makes me feel close to all Chinese people although I cannot speak your language".

Donald Knuth 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".

Donald Knuth had to stop sending real checks in 2008 due to bank fraud, and now gives each error finder a "certificate of deposit" from a publicly listed balance in his fictitious "Bank of San Serriffe".

Donald Knuth published his first "scientific" article in a school magazine in 1957 under the title "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures".

In 1971, Donald Knuth received the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.

Donald Knuth has received various other awards, including the Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the John von Neumann Medal, and the Kyoto Prize.

Donald Knuth was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1980 in recognition of his contributions to the field of computer science.

Donald Knuth was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.

Donald Knuth was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1981 for organizing vast subject areas of computer science so that they are accessible to all segments of the computing community.

Donald Knuth was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2003.

Donald Knuth was elected as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009 for his outstanding contributions to mathematics.

Donald Knuth is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.