Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Biographic Notes

"I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms.
There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent
other people from making use
of one's contributions to computer science."
Donald E. Knuth, TAoCP vol 3

Donald Knuth was born on January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Donald's father Ervin was a  teacher in a Lutheran school; he also played the church organ at the Sunday church services.

During these first years at secondary school there were signs of where Knuth's interests would eventually lead. One episode, repeated in most biographies of Knuth but still worth repeating in this one, concerns "Ziegler's Giant Bar." He entered a competition by the confectionary manufacturer Ziegler to make as many  words with the letters from the phaze "Ziegler's Giant Bar" as possible. Donald spent two weeks during which he pretended to be ill and came up with 4500 words. The judges for the competition had only found 2500. In 1956 he graduated from Milwaukee Lutheran High School and enrolled at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, as a physics major. According to www.digitalcentury.com encyclopedia article about him:

Although Knuth accomplished the highest grade point average in the history of his high school, he and his advisors had doubts as to his ability to succeed at college math. Knuth reports having something of an inferiority complex during his high school and early college years, a problem to which he attributes his over-achiever status. As a college freshman he would spend hours working extra problems in math out of fear that he would fail, only to find after a few months that his abilities far exceeded any of his colleagues.

It looks like at some point he even considered a musical carrier. Here is a relevant quote from  www.digitalcentury.com encyclopedia:

Knuth’s plan to become a music major changed when he was offered a physics scholarship at Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve). His turn toward math came during his sophomore year when a particularly difficult professor assigned a special problem, offering an immediate "A" in the class to any student who could solve it. Although like most of the other students, Knuth considered the problem unsolvable, he made an attempt at it one day when he found himself with some free time, having missed the bus that was taking the marching band to a performance. By what he states was "a stroke of luck," he solved the problem in short order, earned his "A," and skipped class for the rest of the semester. Although Knuth reports that he felt guilty about skipping class, he was obviously able to overcome the lost instruction because the following year he earned an "A" in abstract mathematics and was given the job of grading papers for the very course he had failed to attend.

Here is how this early period of Donald Knuth's life is described in OUT OF THEIR MINDS: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists:

It's probably a lucky coincidence that Knuth entered college the year the IBM 650 became available and managed to start working at the Computing Center. That "career move" actually determined his future. The IBM650 was not just one of the most important early computers, it was the ancestor of personal computers. Prior to the IBM 650, computers were so expensive that most programmers never had physical access to the computer room. It was a faceless and frustrating "batch environment": you handed in a punched card deck with your program and data, and got it back next day (or the same day if you are lucky). I doubt that it would have satisfied Donald Knuth and he probably would navigate his way in some other direction. But on IBM650, users were actually given a block of time and could run their programs, see what went wrong, fix it and try again. It was really fascinating... Because of its cost, the machine was kept busy 24 hours a day and time slots were tiny (often 15 min). Moreover the allocated time might be late at 11:00 pm or even 1:00 am.  Often a user need to share his block of time with another programmer: when one user program stopped, or went into a loop (that can be guessed by the way the lights flickered) the user needed to record the console lights, get off, think about the bug and let his partner use the machine.  

For many universities it was to be their first computer, its attractiveness was considerably enhanced by the availability of a 60% educational discount conditional on the institution teaching certain computer-related courses. Now this 1,966 lb machine that consumed almost 30 Kw of electricity would look more like a primitive calculator than a real computer: it has the memory of just 10,000 decimal digits of storage (less than 40K or 1,000 words; 10 digit per word).  A word can be regarded either as representing ten decimal digits and sign or as an instruction. There is a Java IBM 650 Simulator that you can try. Here is the high level description of the instruction set of IBM 650:

An IBM 650 machine code instruction was of the form: xx yyyy zzzz
where xx was the op code, yyyy was the operand address and zzzz the address of the next instruction. Thus each instruction contained a jump, to allow for the possibility of "optimization." If you program a drum machine with the instructions stored sequentially, you have to wait at least one drum revolution to read the next instruction. By calculating the expected execution time for each instruction, you can place the next instruction at the correct rotation angle around the drum so that it will come up under a read head when the current instruction is done. Since instructions could execute in as little as little as 0.3 ms (for an add), versus a drum revolution time of about 4.8 ms, careful optimization could increase execution speed by a factor of 5 or more. This is similar to the way in which disk drives use an "interleave factor" which interleaves logically adjacent sectors to improve read/write performance.

Instruction words consisted of a two-digit function code, a four-digit operand address, and the four-digit address of the next instruction. The address of the next instruction was important in a drum memory environment. Since the drum was constantly rotating, it would move some distance while each instruction was being executed. So, to minimize the delay between instructions, it would be best to have the next instruction positioned on the drum at the place where the read-write head was when execution of the current instruction was completed. As a result, instructions which followed each other in program logic would be scattered around the drum, not physically next to each other. The manuals for machines gave instruction timings, so that programmers could try to reduce rotational delays. This approach was called minimum latency programming. It was complicated by the need to fetch operands, so that the programmer had to keep in mind the locations of data and of the next instruction. To aid 650 programmers, IBM published a memory chart. It had 200 rows and 10 columns, with each cell representing a word of memory. As you wrote your program, you would place each instruction and data word in an optimal location and then mark that memory cell off as used on the chart.

Today it's really amazing that you can do something useful with such a primitive and slow by today standards machine: (data below were taken from The Columbia University The IBM 650 page; more detailed info can be found in  DDJ The IBM 650 paper by Herb Kugel): 

The 650 could add or subtract in 1.63 milliseconds, multiply in 12.96 msec, and divide in 16.90 ms. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000 word (10 digits and sign) capacity and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms.  ...

BTW Donald Knuth dedicated his the first volume of his classic book "to the Type 650 computer once installed at Case Institute of Technology, in remembrance of many pleasant evenings".  Due to its role as the ancestor of personal computer IBM650 was an important part of early computer folklore. For example here is an early warning attached to the computer in IBM Watson lab:

Achtung! Alles Lookenspeepers !

Das computermachine ist nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.
Ist nicht fur gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen hans in das pockets muss...:
Relaxen und watch das blinkenlichten.

In order to understand better the atmosphere of those early years and the level of  hardware and software development at this time I will reproduce here a part of the computer timeline that covers the period from 1955 to 1960, the college years of Donald Knuth:

1954 650 medium-sized computer introduced by IBM
1955 Sperry-Rand formed by merger of Remington Rand and Sperry Corp 1955 IBM branch in Wellington, NZ starts operations
1955 Wang Laboratories incorporated
1955 Shockley Semiconductor founded in Palo Alto, California, USA
1955 One of the first algorithmic languages II II [PP] was created by A. P. Ershov for BESM computer; also L. N. Korolev, L.D. Panova, V.D. Poderiugin & V.M. Kurochkin, USSR
1955 SHARE users group
1955 BACAIS compiler by Mandalay Grems & R.E. Porter, Boeing Airplane Company, Seattle, USA for IBM 701 [Boeing Airplane Company Algebraic Interpretive Computing System]
1955 IT discussed by Alan Perlis, Mark Koschman, Sylvia Orgel, Joseph W. Smith & Joanne Chipps for Datatron computer, Purdue University Computing Laboratory [Internal Translator]
1955 Kompiler 2 by A. Kenton Elsworth, Robert Kuhn, Leona Schloss & Kenneth Tiede, University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore
1956 IPL language by A Newell, D Shaw, F Simon (Information Programming Language)
1956 ADES declarative language by E. K. Blum, US Naval Ordnance Laboratory [Automatic Digital Encoding System]
1956 APT language by D.T. Ross (Automatic Programmed Tool) - industrial
1956 B-0 compiler by Grace Hopper's programming staff, UNIVAC [later called Procedure Translator, & FLOW-MATIC]
1956 MAILÜFTERL computer by H. Zemanek & team, University of Technology, Austria [MAILUEFTERL = Viennese spring-time breeze - ie, not a Whirlwind]
1956 Burroughs 205
1956 MADCAP language by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (Mark B. Wells?)
1956 IT adapted & run on IBM 650 by Perlis & Smith, with Harold van Zoeren, Carnegie Institute of Technology
1956 Physics Nobel Prize won by Bardeen, Brattain & Shockley for transistor
1956 MATH-MATIC compiler by Charles Katz et al, UNIVAC
1956 Bull S.A. announces very-large, very-fast Gamma 60 for 1960 to compete against IBM
1956 T.J. Watson Jr becomes president of IBM
1956 'Artificial Intelligence' term coined by John McCarthy, MIT
1956 Bizmac shipped by RCA
1956 US Govt antitrust suit settled. IBM has to sell not just leases
1957 Datamatic 1000 Honeywell & Raytheon
1957 Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) founded by Ken Olsen, Maynard Massachusetts
1957 Fairchild Semiconductor founded
1957 Philco 2000 by Philco Corporation - first commercially available transistorised computer.
1957 MAC compiler for Whirlwind by Laning, Philip C. Hankins & Charles P. Werner
1957 Control Data Corporation est. by William Norris & Sperry-Rand engineers
1957 Datamation first published
1958 SAGE direction centre operational, McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey
1958 Atlas by R.M. Kilburn, University of Manchester - first virtual memory
1958 Integrated Circuit (IC) by Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments
1958 NEC-1101, NEC-1102 NEC Japan's First computer (Nippon Electric Company)
1958 Commodore Business Machines founded by Jack Tramiel
1958 FORTRAN II - 1st language accepted worldwide.
1958 CRT as output device by Frank Rosenblatt on Perceptron Mark I
1958 CDC 1604 by Seymour Cray, Control Data Corp, 1st transistorised supercomputer
1958 Planar process of making transistors by Jean Hoerni
1958 ALGOL Zurich. Originally called IAL
1958 LISP language by John McCarthy et al, MIT (LISt Processing) - for artificial intelligence
1959 Packaged program by Computer Science Corporation
1959 Monolithic idea for ICs by Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor
1959 ACM-GAMM report by John Backus
1959 Planar IC by Robert Noyce - for mass manufacturing of ICs
1959 1620 & 1790 - IBM's 2nd generation computers
1959 1401 introduced by IBM
1959 COBOL language by committee of mainframe makers (COmmon Business-Oriented Language)
1959 Teleprinter link between Auckland & Sydney

Knuth used his growing expertise at writing computer programs to produce one in 1958 to analyse the performance of the College basketball team. It led to huge publicity and IBM used a photograph of Knuth in their advertising.

In 1960 the Case faculty took the unprecedented step of awarding Donald Knuth a Master's degree together with the B.S. At this time he was 22 years old. Knuth was awarded two Fellowships, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a National Foundation Fellowship in the year of his graduation. Knuth also published his first two papers in 1960:

• An imaginary number system Describes an imaginary number system using the imaginary number 2i as its base, giving methods for the addition, subtraction and multiplication of the numbers.
• On methods of constructing sets of mutually orthogonal Latin squares using a computer(jointly with R C Bose and I M Chakravarti). Presents two sets of five mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 12.

During the summer of 1960 he worked for Burroughs where he wrote an Algol compiler -- one of the smallest at the time. For that compiler he was paid $5,500 -- not bad money for a student at 1960, but much less that was the common price for such a project. The flowcharts of the compiler were published in Communications of the ACM (Donald E. Knuth: RUNCIBLE-Algebraic Translation on a Limited Computer. Volume 2, Number 11, November 1959. pp 18-21).

He began his doctoral studies in the fall of 1960 at the California Institute of Technology. On 24 June 1961 Knuth married Nancy Jill Carter  Their two children John Martin Knuth and Jennifer Sierra Knuth were born in 1965 and 1966 respectively.

In 1962 the Addison-Wesley suggested that he write a book on compiler construction.  The offer was accepted and lead to now famous "The Art of Computer Programming".  He began that project in the summer of 1962 one year before graduation.

Cal Tech awarded Knuth a doctorate in mathematics in June 1963 for his thesis Finite semifields and projective planes. He then joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He also remained a software development consultant to the Burroughs Corporation in Pasadena, California.  He taught at the Cal Tech from 1962 until 1968. Throughout this period he continued to be involved with software development, serving as consultant to Burroughs Corporation from 1960-1968 and as editor of Programming Languages for ACM publications from 1964-1967.

But the main work was writing the Art of Computer Programming.  His publications from this period show remarkable diversity of his interests. For example he computed Euler's constant to 1271 decimal places and published the result in 1962.

The first volume of The Art of Computer Programming was published in 1968 and instantly became classic. The same year Knuth joined the faculty at Stanford Univercity as Professor of Computer. A this point he resigned from his consultancy position with the Burroughs Corporation.

Knuth held a position as professor at Caltech until 1968. After that he joined a position of professor at Stanford University and for some time, I think, was a chair of computer science department there.

Knuth spent the academic year 1972-73 at the University of Oslo and this visit was influential for the further development of Computer Science in Norway.

In 1974 ACM presented Donald Knuth with the Turing Award, formally the most prestigious award for computer scientists. Some consider it to be highest honor in Computer Science similar to a Nobel Price for physicists, but I respectfully disagree. Here is ACM A.M. Turing Award citation

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

Unfortunately his very interesting Turing lecture (Donald E. Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art. CACM 17(12): 667-673, 1974) is not available online. Those who are interested can get it along with his another ground-breaking paper Structured Programming with goto Statements [1974] in the book  Literate Programming.  BTW Structured Programming with goto Statements is available online[PDF].

From 1968 he was a professor of computer science at the Stanford University. He was appointed Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science in 1977 and in 1990 he was named Professor of The Art of Computer Programming. In 1993 he became Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, resigned from the faculty to devote himself to the finishing of his series of books. He continued to live on the University Campus.

During Stanford  period he made a substantial contributions to the theory of algorithms and his research papers have been instrumental in establishing several important branches of computer science including but not limited to the analysis of algorithms, LR(k) and LL(k) parsing, attribute grammars, empirical study of programming languages, and literate programming. His best-known research in mathematics is represented by the Knuth-Bendix algorithm for word problems (axiomatic reasoning), the Schensted-Knuth correspondence between matrices and tableaux, and an analysis of the big bang that occurs in the evolution of random graphs. In general, his works has been always  directed towards the search for a proper balance between theory and practice.

In 1977 Knuth abruptly shifted his career from writing next volume of the Art of Programming to writing a complex and very successful  typography system TeX and METAFOND. It took him long ten years to finish the TeX system for document preparation and the MF (MetaFont) system for alphabet design. Noteworthy byproducts of those activities were the WEB and CWEB languages for structured documentation, and the accompanying methodology of Literate Programming. One can think about literary programming approach as a hypertext  merge of program code and computer documentation that is produced with an explicit idea of explaining the program to a good competent programmer.

This approach proved to be a very successful in writing TeX, but this new paradigm of software development never found widespread use. As he explained in his interview to Computer Literacy (now Fatbrain.com):

You think of yourself as writing for a human being, explaining to a human being what a computer should do, instead of thinking of yourself as talking to the computer telling it what to do. You get your act together better when you're explaining it to another person. This approach helps even for a program that you're going to throw away after an hour. CWEB is a tool that I recommend using even if you're writing a program only for yourself, for your eyes only.
...

You can create the parts in whatever order is psychologically best for you. Sometimes you can create them from the bottom up. Bottom-up means that you know somehow that you probably need a subroutine that will do something, so you write it now while you're ready, while you're psyched for it. With this bottom- up programming, your pencil gets more powerful every page, because on page nine you've developed more tools that you can use on page ten... your pencil is stronger.

With top-down programming you start at the beginning and say "I'm going to do this first and then this, and then this"... but then you have to spell out what those are--- you can wind up gasping for breath a hundred pages later when you finally figure out how you're actually going to do those things!

Top-down programming tends to look very nice for the first few pages and then it becomes a little hard to keep the threads going. Bottom-up programming also tends to look nice for a while, your pencil is more powerful, but that means you can also do more tricky stuff. If you mix the two in a good psychological way, then it works, even at the end.

I did this with TeX, a very large program: 500+ pages of code in the book . Throughout that entire program, all those lines of code, there was always one thing that had to be the next thing I did. I didn't really have much choice; each step was based on what I'd done so far. No methodology would teach me how to write a piece of software like that, if I followed it rigorously. But if I imagined myself explaining the program to a good competent programmer, all that this long program was, then there was just this one natural way to do it. The order in which the code appears in the book is the order in which I wrote it.

TeX is now used to produce most of the world's scientific literature in physics and mathematics. This one of the first large scale successful open source projects and for this contribution Knuth is considered to be a progeny of free/open source programming movement. As he mentioned in his Advocado interview [Knuth1990]:

I saw that the whole business of typesetting was being held back by proprietary interests, and I didn't need any claim to fame. I had already been successful with my books and so I didn't have to stake it all on anything. So it didn't matter to me whether or not whether I got anything financial out of it.
...

There were people who saw that there was a need for such software, but each one thought that they were going to lock everyone into their system. And pretty much there would be no progress. They wouldn't explain to people what they were doing. They would have people using their thing; they couldn't switch to another, and they couldn't get another person to do the typesetting for them. The fonts would be only available for one, and so on.

But I was thinking about FORTRAN actually, the situation in programming in the '50s, when IBM didn't make FORTRAN an IBM-only thing. So it became a lingua franca. It was implemented on all different machines. And I figured this was such a new subject that whatever I came up with probably wouldn't be the best possible solution. It would be more like FORTRAN, which was the first fairly good solution [chuckle]. But it would be better if it was available to everybody than if there were all kinds of things that people were keeping only on one machine.

So that was part of the thinking. But partly that if I hadn't already been successful with my books, and this was my big thing, I probably would not have said, "well, let's give it away." But since I was doing it really for the love it and I didn't have a stake in it where I needed it, I was much more concerned with the idea that it should be usable by everybody. It's partly also that I come out of traditional mathematics where we prove things, but we don't charge people for using what we prove.

In 1979, at age forty-one, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Jimmy Carter for the first three volumes of the "Art of Computer Programming". He became a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1980, and an Honorary Member of the IEEE in 1982.

In spring 1986 he published five volume Computers and Typesetting, another monumental piece of work of lasting value.  But that work distracted him from more important work on The Art of Computer Programming and no new volume was published after the third volume was published in 1973.

On Jan 1 1990 Donald Knuth discontinued using email because of the level of noise. From this point of view he can be called one of the first registered victims of spam ;-). Later he explained his frustration with junk e-mail in the following way:

I spent fifteen years using electronic mail on the ARPANET and the Internet. Then, in January 1990, I stopped, because it was taking up too much of my time to sift through garbage. I don't have an email address. People trying to write me unsolicited email messages get a polite note saying "Professor Knuth has discontinued reading electronic mail; you can write to him at such and such an address."

Email is wonderful for some people, absolutely necessary for their job, and they can do their work better. I like to say that for people whose role is to be on top of things, electronic mail is great. But my role is to be on the bottom of things. I look at ideas and think about them carefully and try to write them up... I move slowly through things that people have done and try to organize the material. But I don't know what is happening this month.

So now I don't read electronic mail, but I do use it occasionally.

In 1993 he officially retied from the Stanford University and concentrated completely on finishing the Art of Computer programming, probably the last attempt of a single person to cover all major areas of computer science. He continue to live on the Stanford University Campus with his wife Jill and their two children John and Jennifer.  Unofficially, he retired in 1990, on the same day he gave up email. He explained his move in the following way:

...I had looked ahead and seen that it would take twenty years of work, full-time. If I continued doing everything else that I was doing, it was going to be forty or fifty years of work. I was just not getting anywhere, I was getting further and further behind. So I said, "Enough." Naturally, I hate to give up many of these other things that I like doing very much. But there are some things I didn't hate giving up, like writing proposals. I'm very happy to give up those!

... as a professor, in order to have decent equipment for my grad students, or to have visitors for active research programs, to publish reports, etc., I needed to find sponsors. It's a lot of work begging for money. The System Development Foundation said they'd give me a million dollars so that I could finish TeX and get back to The Art of Computer Programming.

...still [it] took many, many years to finish TeX. I decided that the only way I would be able to finish The Art of Computer Programming is by going into full-time writing, and being a hermit, and telling people "No." It was hard to adjust the first couple of years. Now I feel real efficient, and the writing is going well. A nice steady state.

Still since his retirement, Knuth gives seven to eight lectures annually under the title of “Computer Musings.” In essence this is half-lectures/half reports about his work on current problems connected with writing The Art of Computer Programming:

I give lectures at Stanford every month or so, when I'm in town, called "Computer Musings" . I plan to keep this up for twenty years, to give a talk on whatever I find interesting that month, on neat ideas I've picked up... I bring up problems that I can't solve, so that somebody will do it for me. Now, if I can't solve a problem in two hours, I've got to give it up and tell somebody else to work on it; otherwise, I'll get behind again. As I write the book, I've got to move from topic to topic, and my attention span is maybe three weeks on any particular topic.

Some of them are available on the Internet.

In 1996 he was awarded Kyoto Prize  for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences, Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize and the country’s highest private award for lifetime achievement. The Kyoto Prize is awarded each year in three categories: advanced technology, basic sciences and creative arts. Knuth won in advanced technology.  The "Advanced Technology" prize is approximately $460,000, along with a certificate and a gold medal. “This is just a dream and I’ll have to wake up to see who really won the prize,” Knuth said. He and his wife have decided to donate the money to charity.

Personality-wise Knuth is known for being kind and humble person. By virtue of being near him, you feel you are smarter and a better person. The greatness of his achievements is inversely proportional to his willingness to admit them. He’s made it clear that he considers himself less of an innovator than a cataloguer.  At the same time he is one of few computer scientists, who has an award in his name while still alive -- The Knuth Prize:

The Donald E. Knuth prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science is awarded every 1.5 years by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory (SIGACT) and the IEEE Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing. The Prize includes a $5000 award and a $1000 travel stipend (for travel to the award ceremony) paid by ACM SIGACT and IEEE TCMFC. The Prize is awarded for major research accomplishments and contributions to the foundations of computer science over an extended period of time. The first Knuth Prize was presented at the 1996 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). Future prizes will be awarded alternately at the ACM STOC and the IEEE Conference on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS).

The Prize is named in honor and recognition of the extraordinary accomplishments of Prof. Donald Knuth, Emeritus at Stanford University. Prof. Knuth is best known for his ongoing multivolume series, The Art of Computer Programming, which played a critical role in establishing and defining Computer Science as a rigorous, intellectual discipline. Prof. Knuth has also made fundamental contributions to the subfields of analysis of algorithms, compilers, string matching, term rewriting systems, literate programming, and typography. His TeX and MF systems are widely accepted as standards for electronic typesetting. Prof. Knuth's work is distinguished by its integration of theoretical analyses and practical real-world concerns. In his work, theory and practice are not separate components of Computer Science, but rather he shows them to be inexorably linked branches of the same whole.

The Knuth Prize winner is selected by a Prize Committee consisting of 6 individuals selected by the SIGACT and TCMFC Chairs.

In selecting the Knuth Prize winner, the Committee will place particular attention on a sustained record of high-impact, seminal contributions to the foundations of computer science. The selection can also be partly based on educational accomplishments and contributions such as fundamental textbooks and high-quality students. The award is not based on service work for the community, although service might be included in the citation for a winner if it is appropriate.

Nominations for the prize will be considered by the Committee, but are not required in order to receive the Prize. All nominations should be sent to the Chair of the Prize Committee.

Past Winners

• 1999: László Lovász    
• 1997: Leslie M. Valiant
• 1996: Andrew C.-C. Yao

Funny enough he was nominated for the 2nd Annual Free Software Foundation Awards and lost to Miguel de Icaza, the guy who has tremendous difficulties in replicating Norton Commander and was never able fully grasp the concepts beyond this John Socha's masterpiece. 

After reading about this event on Slashdot,  I begin to suspect that Richard Stallman and his pet The Free Software Foundation completely had lost contact with reality and became more like a variation of an second-rate leftist party or, if you wish, an obscure cult :-(.  As one Slashdot reader pointed out:

Why not Knuth?
by the_tsi (wNiOlSlPiAeM@perigee.net) on Tuesday December 14, @07:01PM EST (#21)
(User Info)

I recognize that Gnome is an important step for linux (err.. unices in general) to move towards the desktop, but it certainly isn't ``core functionality'' that I need my computers to do. I mean, there are parallel technologies which allow similar things.

TeX on the other hand, has been around for a long time and is used non-stop in the lab where I work. Without it, the reports we dump out would probably take forever to make. I can't imagine using Word (or any word processor for that matter) to create documents that change as much in revision as ours do. TeX is a much more earth-shattering development than a spiffy new interface to X.

I think the FSF awards copped out and picked based on ``current and trendy'' instead of deserving of an award. Of course, if there is a monetary award involved (since there's no article, I can't tell, but I imagine there is), then I can see the politics behind it. Gnome sure needs cash more than any TeX-related project.

Congrats to the nominees and the winner.

-Chris

Currently Donald Knuth is still writing Volume 4 of  The Art of computer programming.  It is interesting to note that he works with computer standing [STANFORD Magazine May-June 2006 ]

Most nights you can find him in his upstairs study, a cozy room lined with so many books and papers that he relies on a computerized index to tell him what goes where. Although he stands to work at his computers, Knuth writes longhand, reclining beneath the amber lamplight in a Dux chaise lounge whose upholstery is in its third incarnation and whose powers of comfort he deems “magical.”

Several part of it were published in 2005 (along with the description of MMIX, a new CPU architecture that replaced outdated MIX). It is expected that the volume will be finished in 2008, but let's keep our fingers crossed.  And as in 2008 he will be 70 years  this will be a proper birthday gift both to himself and humanity.

He estimate that it might take another twenty years to write the remaining five volumes. Let's hope that he will manage to finish them all. Actually the gap between the third and the forth volume is such that he can get to Guinness Book of Records as well ;-). Anyway Knuth is still hopeful about finishing five volumes but wonders how long computer science, which is, after all, a man-made field of study, will continue to provide challenging problems that aren’t too esoteric or derivative [STANFORD Magazine May-June 2006]:

“We’re nowhere near the limits of interesting things to do—we’re getting more every year than we had the previous year,” he says, yet muses, “How can we predict that that’s going to continue, that we aren’t going to have some kind of closure?”

But he’s also very hopeful about the field’s future—computers are more powerful than ever, and the kind of cross-disciplinary cooperation he enjoyed with artists during his typography days is increasingly common. Just as he showed mathematicians that computer science would give them new room to explore, he hopes scholars from other fields will infuse computer science with fresh ideas. “The scientific world of the future will be pairs, or connections,” he says. “Everybody is going to be a bridge between specialties.” Fascinated by interdisciplinary overlap, Knuth is researching a book on how people computed before computers, finding the roots of binary thinking in places like the I Ching and ancient Greek poetry.

In retirement, he still writes several programs a week. He no longer advises students, but he hosts free public Computer Musings talks several times a year, drops in on graduate-level courses occasionally, and bikes to campus most days of the week to use the libraries or swim at the aquatic center. He famously regards e-mail as a time sink and no longer reads it—except for correspondence (printed out by a department secretary) relating to errata or his current work. His primary agenda item is, after all, Volume 4, although every few months he’ll browse journals for items to squirrel away for Volumes 5 through 7. People inquire delicately about how he expects to complete a seven-volume project at his current pace, and Knuth concedes he’ll be content to finish the first five.

Those are the core of his series, he says, and the last two are more specialized topics. “If I get to the end of Number 5 and I see nobody’s yet written what I want to say about Number 6, I’ll continue.” Despite the enormous changes in computer technology since he began his series, the English editions of each of the first three books still sell about 3,000 copies annually. The books have been translated into 10 languages, with more on the way.

Those around him also seem unfazed by the enormousness of his task, including his extraordinarily patient editor (“When I actually present him with something, he’s surprised,” says Knuth) and Jill, who recently tried to urge deadline compliance with the help of stickers on a chart. She gave up when her husband overshot every goal. “Because he is a perfectionist, he is often tempted to go off on a sidetrack,” she says. “The whole typeface thing was one of those branches, and that’s been beneficial to a lot of people. Nobody can say he shouldn’t have done it.”

For a guy who’s devoted to exploring, this is fitting. “The journey is more important than the destination—that’s part of life,” he says. “If you only live for getting to the end, you’re almost always disappointed.” Perhaps, he adds, what seems like a liability is really a stroke of luck. “If I had been good at making estimates of how long something was going to take, I never would have started.”

Last modified: April 28, 2008