donald knuth

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DONALD KNUTH

Presented by Nithya Lavanya


Early Life  Donald Ervin Knuth is a prominent living computer scientist  He was born on January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Knuth's parents were Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning.  Knuth was greatly inspired by his father and from whom he gained his love

for education, music, and mathematics.


Education  Early schooling :Lutheran schools and from the special focus that was placed on

English grammar  1956 he graduated from High School.  1960 he received his Bachelor of Science degree, simultaneously being awarded a

Master of Science degree  1960 Knuth entered the California Institute of Technology  June 1963, he was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics for his thesis titled “Finite semi

fields and projective planes”.  1963 Knuth became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of

Technology, being promoted to Associate Professor in 1966.  1964 to 1967 he worked as an Editor of Programming Languages for the Association

for Computing Machinery


Interests  his love for education, music, and mathematics  Father's Remington Rand calculator.  Ziegler's Giant Bar  played the saxophone and tuba  Case Institute of Technology, Knuth was introduced to the IBM

650, one of the early mainframes  Knuth constructed a program based on the value of each player that

could help his school basketball team win the league.  In 1960, shifted from physics to mathematics


IBM 650


Remington rand calculator


Interest toward CS  His passion was towards music in childhood  But he was good enough with other subjects too.  Physics  Physics to Mathematics(freshman year)  summer vacations, Knuth was hired to write about compilers in

his college level which helped him to earn money which led to write about compiler design in 1962


Contributions  compiler design in 1962  The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)  Volume 1 – Fundamental Algorithms  Volume 2 – Seminumerical Algorithms  Volume 3 – Sorting and Searching  Volume 4 – Combinatorial Algorithms  Volume 5 – Syntactic Algorithms (2011, as of estimated for release in 2020)  Volume 6 – The Theory of Context-Free Languages (planned)  Volume 7 – Compiler Techniques (planned)


Inventions  TeX  Meta font  MMIX  Knuth- Bendix Algorithm  Structure and Literate Programming


Awards  First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1971  Turing Award, 1974  Lester R. Ford Award, 1975 and 1993  Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, 1978  National Medal of Science, 1979  Franklin Medal, 1988  John von Neumann Medal, 1995  Harvey Prize from the Technion, 1995  Kyoto Prize, 1996  Katayanagi Prize, 2010  BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Information and Communication

Technologies, 2010  Stanford University School of Engineering Hero Award, 2011


Thank you!!


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