
For example, in eighth grade, he entered a contest to find the number of words that the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar" could be rearranged to create the judges had identified 2,500 such words. Knuth, while a student at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, thought of ingenious ways to solve problems. : 66 His father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping. He describes his heritage as "Midwestern Lutheran German".
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Knuth strongly opposes the granting of software patents, having expressed his opinion to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organisation.ĭonald Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning. 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.Īs 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. In the process, he also popularized the asymptotic notation.

He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming and contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms". He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.


Donald Ervin Knuth ( / k ə ˈ n uː θ/ kə- NOOTH born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University.
