Donald Knuth: Computer Science Author
Introduction
Donald Ervin Knuth (born January 10, 1938) is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. Author of the seminal multi-volume work, The Art of Computer Programming , 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 writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB/CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MMIX instruction set architecture.
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.
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.
Books
- Concrete Mathematics
- The Stanford GraphBase: A Platform for Combinatorial Computing
- MMIXware: A RISC Computer for the Third Millennium
- The Art of Computer Programming
- Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms
- Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms
- Volume 3: Sorting and Searching
- Volume 4: Combinatorial Algorithms
- Literate Programming
- Selected Papers on Computer Science
- Digital Typography
- Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms
- Selected Papers on Computer Languages
- Selected Papers on Discrete Mathematics
- Computers & Typesetting
- Volume A: The TeXbook
- Volume B: TeX: The Program
- Volume C: The METAFONTbook
- Volume D: METAFONT: The Program
- Volume E: Computer Modern Typefaces
- Surreal Numbers
- Mathematical Writing
- Mathematics for the Analysis of Algorithms
- Mariages Stables
- Axioms and Hulls
- 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
- Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
links
- http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
http://cs.stanford.edu
http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?awd=140
http://awards.acm.org/hopper
Authors: Keron Marrow
Last Updated: March 30, 2010
