48 Facts About Donald Knuth

1.

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University.

2.

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

3.

Donald Knuth is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming and contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

7.

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

8.

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

9.

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

10.

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

11.

Donald Knuth was one of the founding editors of Case Institute's Engineering and Science Review, which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959.

12.

Donald Knuth then switched from physics to mathematics, and received two degrees from Case in 1960: his bachelor of science degree, and simultaneously a master of science by a special award of the faculty, who considered his work exceptionally outstanding.

13.

Donald Knuth accepted a commission to write a book on computer programming language compilers.

14.

Donald Knuth originally planned to publish this as a single book.

15.

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 University campus, which was performing mathematical research in cryptography to support the National Security Agency.

16.

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

17.

Donald Knuth then left his position to join the Stanford University faculty in 1969, where he is Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus.

18.

Donald Knuth is a writer, as well as a computer scientist.

19.

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

20.

However, Donald Knuth had only finished the first two volumes when he came to Oslo, and thus spent the year on the third volume, next to teaching.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Donald Knuth is an occasional contributor of language puzzles to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

Donald Knuth used WEB to program TeX and METAFONT, and published both programs as books: TeX: The Program, which was originally published in 1986, and METAFONT: The Program, which was originally published in 1986.

35.

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

36.

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".

37.

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".

38.

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

39.

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

40.

At the TUG 2010 Conference, Donald Knuth announced a satirical XML-based successor to TeX, titled "iTeX", which would support features such as arbitrarily scaled irrational units, 3D printing, input from seismographs and heart monitors, animation, and stereophonic sound.

41.

In 1971, Donald Knuth was the recipient of the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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