Donald Knuth's book on compilers grew into a seven-volume life's work
In 1962 a publisher asked Donald Knuth for a book on compilers. He decided he first needed a theory of programming itself, and the project swelled into The Art of Computer Programming. Along the way he created the TeX typesetting system, won the 1974 Turing Award and became known as the father of algorithm analysis.
Knuth was born in Milwaukee on January 10, 1938, to a family he calls Midwestern Lutheran German; his father ran a small printing business. In eighth grade he entered a contest to find words made from the letters of Ziegler's Giant Bar. Judges had counted 2,500. Knuth faked a stomach ache, stayed home with an unabridged dictionary and found more than 4,500, winning his school a television and candy bars for everyone.
He went to Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland on a physics scholarship in 1956, met the IBM 650 computer and promptly rewrote its assembler and compiler because he thought he could do better. In 1958 he built a program rating basketball players' scoring chances, which Newsweek and CBS reported. Switching to mathematics, he graduated in 1960 with a bachelor's and, by special faculty award, a master's at the same time. He then wrote an ALGOL compiler for Burroughs for 5,500 dollars and earned a Caltech doctorate in 1963.
Money and prestige did not sway him easily. He turned down a 100,000-dollar compiler contract and gave up prestigious fellowships so he could keep consulting for Burroughs, which he did from 1960 to 1968. There he proposed letting one symbol stand for a string of symbols, the origin of DEFINE in Burroughs ALGOL; Edsger Dijkstra was the last holdout who thought it a terrible idea. He moved to Stanford in 1969 and is now professor emeritus there.
The first volume of his magnum opus appeared in 1968, after the plan grew from one book to six and then seven. His work made rigorous analysis of algorithm efficiency a discipline and popularised asymptotic notation. He built TeX with its companion METAFONT and the Computer Modern typefaces, created WEB and CWEB for literate programming, and designed the MIX and MMIX instruction sets. He has argued against software patents before both US and European patent authorities.
Source: Donald Knuth
