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Early life
Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to German-Americans Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning. His father had two jobs: running a small printing company and teaching bookkeeping at Milwaukee Lutheran High School. Donald, a student at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, received academic accolades there, especially because of the ingenious ways that he thought of solving problems. -
High School
He graduated from High School in 1956 with the highest grade point average that anyone had ever achieved at his school. -
Student
He entered the physics course at the Case Institute in September 1956 -
the first "scientific" article
Knuth published his first "scientific" article in a school magazine in 1957 under the title "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures." In it, he defined the fundamental unit of length as the thickness of Mad No. 26, and named the fundamental unit of force "whatmeworry." Mad published the article in issue No. 33 (June 1957).[34][35] -
Education
Knuth had a difficult time choosing physics over music as his major at Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University). He also joined Beta Nu Chapter of the Theta Chi fraternity. In 1958, Knuth created a program to help his school's basketball team win their games. He 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. -
Аs one of the founders of the editors of the "Engineering and Scientific Review"as one of the founders of the editors of the "Engineering and Scientific Review"
Knuth was one of the founding editors of the Engineering and Science Review, which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959.[9] He then switched from physics to mathematics, and in 1960 he received his bachelor of science degree, simultaneously being given a master of science degree by a special award of the faculty who considered his work exceptionally outstanding. -
Recreational mathematics
Knuth has also delved into recreational mathematics. He 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.[21] -
Family
Donlald Knuth married Nancy Jill Carter on 24 June 1961, while he was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. They have two children, John Martin Knuth and Jennifer Sierra Knuth. -
California Institute of Technology
In 1963, with mathematician Marshall Hall as his adviser, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology -
The Art of Computer Programming.
He accepted a commission to write a book on computer programming language compilers. While working on this project, Knuth decided that he could not adequately treat the topic without first developing a fundamental theory of computer programming, which became The Art of Computer Programming. As Knuth developed his outline for the book, he concluded that he required six volumes, and then seven, to thoroughly cover the subject. He published the first volume in 1968. -
Description of Knuth computer science
In the 1970s, Knuth described computer science as "a totally new field with no real identity. And the standard of available publications was not that high. A lot of the papers coming out were quite simply wrong. ... So one of my motivations was to put straight a story that had been very badly told." -
Recipient of the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
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. -
National Academy of Sciences
Knuth was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. -
After producing the third volume of his series
After producing the third volume of his series in 1976, he expressed such a frustration with the nascent state of the then developed electronic publishing tools (especially those that provided input to phototypesetters) that he took time out to work on typesetting and created the TeX and Metafont tools. -
Knuth's Chinese name is Gao Dena
Knuth's Chinese name is Gao Dena (simplified Chinese: 高德纳; traditional Chinese: 高德納; pinyin: Gāo dé nà). In 1977, he was given this name by Frances Yao, shortly before making a 3-week trip to China. In his 1980 volume of The Art of Computer Programming (simplified Chinese:计算机程序设计艺术; traditional Chinese: 電腦程式設計藝術; pinyin: Jìsuànjī chéngxù shèjì yìshù), Knuth explains that he embraced his Chinese name because he wanted to be known by the growing numbers of computer programmers in China at the time -
DFBCS
Knuth was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) in 1980 in recognition of Knuth's contributions to the field of computer science. -
Knuth's Chinese name
In 1989, his Chinese name was placed on the headline of the journal Computer Science and Technology, which Knut says "makes me feel closer to all the Chinese, although I can not speak your language." -
Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming
In 1990 he was awarded the one-of-a-kind academic title of Professor of The Art of Computer Programming, which has since been revised to Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming. -
French Academy of Sciences
In 1992, he became an associate of the French Academy of Sciences. Also that year, he retired from regular research and teaching at Stanford University in order to finish The Art of Computer Programming. -
Foreword to the book A B by Marko Petkovšek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberge
In 1995, Knuth wrote the foreword to the book A=B by Marko Petkovšek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger.[20] Knuth is also an occasional contributor of language puzzles to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. -
ForMemRS
He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2003. -
diagnos with prostate cancer
In 2006, Knuth was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent surgery in December that year and started "a little bit of radiation therapy... as a precaution but the prognosis looks pretty good", as he reported in his video autobiography. -
banking fraud
According to an article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review, these Knuth reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies". 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". -
Knuth as a researcher
Knuth was elected as a Fellow (first class of Fellows) of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009 for his outstanding contributions to mathematics.He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. -
TUG 2010 Conference
At the TUG 2010 Conference, Knuth announced a satirical XML-based successor to TeX, titled "iTeX" (pronounced [iː˨˩˦tɛks˧˥], performed with a bell ringing), which would support features such as arbitrarily scaled irrational units , 3D printing, input from seismographs and heart monitors, animation, and stereophonic sound -
fellow of the American Mathematical Society
In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. -
Concrete Mathematics, TAoCP
By 2013, the first three volumes and part of the volume of the series were published. [17] Concrete Mathematics: Fund for Informatics 2nd ed., Which arose with the extension of the mathematical preliminary section of Volume 1 of the TAoCP, was also published. -
London Mathematical Society
In 2015 Knuth was elected to Honorary Membership of the London Mathematical Society in its 150th Anniversary year.
