Donald E. Knuth

1938-

American Mathematician and Computer Scientist

Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, published in 1968, became the authoritative textbook in the subject during the 1970s. But just as computers have evolved, so has Knuth's monumental text: the fourth of a planned seven-volume series was published in 1995. As a mathematician and computer scientist, Knuth has established a number of key ideas in both fields, and has developed a pair of computer languages, TEX and METAFONT.

Born on January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Knuth was the son of Ervin and Louise Bohning Knuth. His father was the first college graduate in the history of the family, and worked first as a grade-school teacher before taking a position as a bookkeeping teacher at a private Lutheran high school. From his father, Knuth learned an appreciation not only for learning in general, but for mathematics—and music—in particular.

As a junior-high and high-school student, Knuth showed prodigious talents. No doubt drawn by the almost mathematical precision of grammar, he was that rare child who loved to diagram sentences, and often practiced diagramming ones he saw outside of textbooks. When Ziegler's Candies ran a contest to see who could find the most word combinations in the phrase "Ziegler's Giant Bar," Knuth feigned sickness for two weeks so that he could stay home and pore over a dictionary for words. He came up with a list of 4,500 words, even without using the apostrophe—far more than the Ziegler's master list of 2,500 words. As a result, his school won a television set and enough Ziegler candy bars for the entire student body.

Graduating with the highest grade-point average in the history of his high school, Knuth enrolled at Case Institute of Technology, planning to study physics. But while at Case, he had his first encounter with a computer, an IBM 650 whose manual he studied thoroughly. From this examination Knuth concluded that he, too, could write programs, and soon he began to do just that. In 1958 he developed a program to assist his school's basketball coach in analyzing players; not only did this help the team win a league championship, according to the coach, but Newsweek ran an article about Knuth.

Having proved himself every bit as talented in college as he had been in high school, Knuth graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree—and the Case faculty made the unprecedented move of simultaneously awarding him a Master's degree in mathematics. He then moved to California and enrolled at the California Institute of Technology, or Cal Tech, from which he earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1963.

Knuth became an assistant professor of mathematics at Cal Tech, but he remained fascinated with computers, and in particular compilers—programs that convert programs written in human language to codes that can be understood by computers. In 1962 publisher Addison-Wesley approached Knuth, still in graduate school at the time, about writing a book on the subject of compilers. The result was The Art of Computer Programming, the first three volumes of which appeared in 1968, 1969, and 1973.

Among the ideas pioneered by Knuth was "lookahead," a concept whereby a compiler looks ahead by a few words to decide on the grammatical context of prior words. His idea of inherited attributes, an expansion on the "attribute grammar" of Backus and Naur, provided a basis for the object-oriented techniques that dominated computer programming during the 1990s.

Knuth's interest in typography led to the creation of his computer languages TEX, a typesetting program, and METAFONT, which shapes letters. At one point he wrote an entire paper on the subject of "The Letter S"—its shape throughout history, and the mathematical properties of that shape.

Knuth became a professor at Stanford University in 1968, and remains with Stanford as a professor emeritus. He has received numerous awards, including the Alan M. Turing Award (1974), the National Medal of Science (presented by President Jimmy Carter in 1979), the Steele Prize (1978), a Guggenheim fellowship, and honorary degrees from universities around the world. Knuth married Jill Carter in 1961, and the couple have two children, John and Jennifer.

JUDSON KNIGHT