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Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth
Knuth in 2011
Born
Donald Ervin Knuth

(1938-01-10) January 10, 1938 (age 86)
Education
Known for
SpouseNancy Jill Carter
Children2
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsStanford University
University of Oslo
ThesisFinite Semifields and Projective Planes (1963)
Doctoral advisorMarshall Hall, Jr.[2]
Doctoral students
Websitecs.stanford.edu/~knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth (/kəˈnθ/[3] kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.[4] Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".[5]

Knuth is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process, he also popularized the asymptotic notation. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

As a writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB and CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MIX/MMIX instruction set architectures. He strongly opposes the granting of software patents, and has expressed his opinion to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organisation.

  1. ^ "Professor Donald Knuth ForMemRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on November 17, 2015.
  2. ^ a b Donald Knuth at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference faq was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Turing Award was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Karp, Richard M. (February 1986). "Combinatorics, Complexity, and Randomness". Communications of the ACM. 29 (2): 98–109. doi:10.1145/5657.5658.

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