# 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."

## The End

### Thank you very much