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14 unusual facts about Donald Knuth

21656 Knuth

It is named after Donald Knuth, a renowned computer scientist and mathematician, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.

99 Bottles of Beer

The computer scientist Donald Knuth proved that the song has complexity $O(\log N)$ in his in-joke-article "The Complexity of Songs".

Andrey Ershov

Donald Knuth considers him to be the inventor of the idea of hashing.

The first version of the LNX-BBC that was independent from Linuxcare was 1.618 (a number suggested by team member Seth Schoen, an approximation of the golden ratio, or phi (φ), and a tribute to Donald Knuth who uses successively more precise approximations of π for versioning his TeX typesetting system).

Computer Literacy Bookshops

The store not only sold books and periodicals but displayed galley pre-prints for skimming and editing, held author and guest engineer speaking events such as Gene Amdahl or Donald Knuth.

Device independent file format

Toward this end, a DVI file is a sequence of commands which form "a machine-like language", in Knuth's words.

Indagationes Mathematicae

The typesetting, including mathematical functions, was chosen by Donald Knuth as one of three examples of typesetting quality when he designed the TeX digital typesetting software from 1978.

Johann Faulhaber

Donald Knuth suggests he is the first to crack the code: (the task of cracking the code is relatively easy with modern computers) and shows that Faulhaber had the correct formulae up to k = 23, but his formulae for k = 24 and k = 25 appear to be wrong.

Metafont

Donald Knuth started work on font creation software in 1977, and produced the first version of Metafont in 1979.

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Donald Knuth: Metafont: The Program, Addison-Wesley 1986.

Newton Faller

Later, Robert G. Gallager (1978) and Donald Knuth (1985) proposed some complements and the algorithm became widely known as FGK (from the initials of each of the researchers).

PdfTeX

The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.

Tea with the Black Dragon

Mayland Long, an Asian gentleman, who is skilled in languages, including those used for computer programming (he settles down to read Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming with a “contented sigh”) and who may be a transformed 2,000 year old Chinese dragon, aids Martha in her search for her daughter.

Word ladder

Donald Knuth used a computer to study word ladders of five-letter words.

Adaptive Huffman coding

There are a number of implementations of this method, the most notable are FGK (Faller-Gallager-Knuth) and Vitter algorithm.

Analytic combinatorics

Many precursors of these ideas can be listed, among which Leonhard Euler, Arthur Cayley, Srinivasa Ramanujan, George Pólya, Donald Knuth.

Concrete Mathematics

Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik, is a textbook that is widely used in computer-science departments.

Dmitry Mirimanoff

Therefore, Donald Knuth, who has read Renault's article, will credit Mirimanoff instead of André in future printings of Volume 1 of his monograph The Art of Computer Programming.

Hash function

Donald Knuth notes that Hans Peter Luhn of IBM appears to have been the first to use the concept, in a memo dated January 1953, and that Robert Morris used the term in a survey paper in CACM which elevated the term from technical jargon to formal terminology.

History of sentence spacing

However, the reason Donald Knuth gave for creating the TeX typesetting system was his dismay on receiving the proofs of a new edition of his book The Art of Computer Programming at the unreadability of the then new close-fitted phototypesetting technology, which he described as "awful" due to its "poor spacing".