Donald E. Knuth: Protogeek
A Portrait
neuland Fachtag — 23.11.2017
Donald Ervin Knuth [Ka-NOOTH]
born: 10.01.1938
his father had two jobs:
- small printing company
- taught bookkeeping at high school
8th grade: Ziegler's Giant Bar
1st publication
... and of course
The electronic coach
Studies
1960: building a compiler
Algol 58 Compiler for the Burroughs 205
1962: Addison Wesley
How about a book about compilers?
- Chapter 1 – Basic concepts
- Chapter 2 – Information structures
- Chapter 3 – Random numbers
- Chapter 4 – Arithmetic
- Chapter 5 – Sorting Techniques
- Chapter 6 – Searching Techniques
- Chapter 7 – Combinatorial Searching
- Chapter 8 – Recursion
- Chapter 9 – Lexical Scanning
- Chapter 10 – Parsing Techniques
- Chapter 11 – Mathematical Linguistics
- Chapter 12 – Programming Language Translation
1966: Draft done...
3000 handwritten pages
about 700 printed?
no - about 3000 printed
Let's split it up...
... and maybe expand a little?
The Art of Computer Programming
Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (1968)
Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms (1969)
Volume 3: Sorting and Searching (1973)
The Art of Computer Programming
Heavy on exercises (answers 130/650 pages)
Difficulty Scale: 00...50
MIX (hypothetical computer)
0x$1.00 ($2.56) for bugs
1974: Turing Award
major contributions
to the analysis of algorithms
and the design of programming languages
1977: 2nd edition of Volume 2
Phototypesetting
Digital typography coming up
Fix this on sabbatical
TeX
took a little longer
Literate Programming: WEB (WEAVE & TANGLE)
"Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do."
since V3 feature complete
Now version 3.14159265 (January 2014)
Metafont
TeX - the code - the book...
The Art of Computer Programming
Volume 4a: Combinatorial Algorithms 1 (2011)
MMIX (hypothetical 64bit RISC)
Volume 4b: Fascicle 6, Satisfiability (2015)
Volume 5: Syntactic Algorithms
(Estimated to be ready in 2025)
Wikipedia:
"Publication date: 1968– (the book is still incomplete)"
Writing - but retired
No email since 01.01.1990 (15 years are enough)
Traditional christmas lecture
Passionate organ player
Birthday Symposium
"The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole."