Donald Knuth

Also known as Donald E. Knuth, Don Knuth, Donald Ervin Knuth, D.E.K., DEK, Knuth

American computer scientist and mathematician (born 1938)

AI overview

Donald Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician born in 1938 who is recognized as a foundational figure in computer science. His work has significantly shaped how programmers understand algorithms and the theoretical foundations of computing.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1938
Works: 114

Top works

Leaders in Computing
The Essential Knuth
Computers and Typesetting, Volume A
Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4B, Boxed Set
Computers and Typesetting, Volume C

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United States
Active from: 1938-01-10

Official site

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 66
Total plays: 165

Similar artists

Veritasium

via Last.fm · Donald Knuth

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Upper Echelons: The Organization as a Reflection of Its Top Managers
· 1984 · cited 33,960x
The MOS 36-ltem Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36)
· 1992 · cited 29,113x
The M06 suite of density functionals for main group thermochemistry, thermochemical kinetics, noncovalent interactions, excited states, and transition elements: two new functionals and systematic testing of four M06-class functionals and 12 other functionals
· 2007 · cited 28,934x
An Algorithm for Least-Squares Estimation of Nonlinear Parameters
· 1963 · cited 24,436x
The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects
· 1983 · cited 24,106x

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Quotes

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”
“I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level.”
“The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.”
“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 whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.”
“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Official website

Don Knuth's Home Page

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu →

Link to the official site · 5,089 chars · not written by Vinony

~28 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Donald Ervin Knuth (/kəˈnuːθ/ 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. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".

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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Donald Knuth” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.