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Donald Knuth
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Donald Knuth's parents were Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning. Donald's father Ervin was a school teacher who taught in a Lutheran school. He played a very important role in determining Donald's interests, and it was through his father that that Donald gained his love for education, music, and mathematics. Ervin played the church organ at the Sunday church services and Donald soon became a passionate lover of the organ.
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Donald Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University, was one of three winners of the 1996 Kyoto Prizes for lifetime achievement inthe arts and sciences. The prizes are awarded by the Inawori Foundation, and include a cash award of 50 million yen. This year's other winners were Mario Capecchi, a human geneticist at the University of Utah, and Willard Van Orman Quine, a logician and philosopher at Harvard.
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Donald Knuth has received various awards and honours, amongst them the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the John von Neumann Medal and the Kyoto Prize. He is Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.
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Donald Knuth's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of literate programming to the development of the TeX programming language. One of the foremost figures in the field of mathematical sciences, Knuth has written papers which are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. In this collection, the second in the series, Knuth explores the relationship between computers and typography. The present volume, in the words of the author, is a legacy to all the work he has done on typography. When he thought he would take a few years' leave from his main work on the art of computer programming, as is well known, the short typographic detour lasted more than a decade. When type designers, punch cutters, typographers, book historians, and scholars visited the University during this period, it gave to Stanford what some consider to be its golden age of digital typography.
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Donald Knuth, in his series of books on the TeX typesetting system, introduced a whimsical symbol he called the "dangerous bend" sign. to warn about esoterica" [The METAFONTbook, preface, 1986]. His purpose was to set off portions of the text that took a "dangerous bend" in the train of thought, and which could be skipped without missing the essential message. The symbol was ... itself an exhibition of Knuth's wit and humor: To create the symbol, he used METAFONT, a system designed for mathematical "signs," not road "signs." The program for the dangerous bend symbol even becomes an example to illustrate custom-made characters [The METAFONTbook, pages 106--107]. And of course, the text of that example is itself preceded by the dangerous bend warning.
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Donald Knuth is perhaps best known for having written the classic, multi-volume series, The Art of Computer Programming, the "Bible" of computer science pedagogy. He has written dozens of books and hundreds of articles on mathematics and computer science, and has influenced the thinking of countless students of computer science.
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Donald Knuth