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DONALD KNUTH |
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| Donald Knuth was born in 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His
first encounter with a computer was an IBM 650 in 1956. He studied the basic hardware program (assembly
language) from the manual. From this, he wrote programs
which performed mathematical functions such as factoring
numbers into primes. He taught computers how to play tic tac toe by learning from their previous losses. He also
created a program which rated the performance of the
players in the school’s basketball team. The coach
attributed the program to their winning of the
championship league title.
He graduated with a summa cum laude from Case in 1960, with a simultaneous Master’s degree. He earned his doctorate in mathematics from Cal Tech in 1963 and served on the faculty as a Professor of Mathematics. Knuth has carried out pioneering work in compilers, generally considered a tough task in computer science. His most notable success was the development of LR(K) parsing, a general method that significantly streamlined the process of determining the grammatical rules that define a string of words. In collaboration with one of his graduate students in Cal Tech, Knuth developed the Knuth-Bendix algorithm, for exploring the consequences of mathematical axioms. He also developed the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm along with one of his students. This algorithm streamlined the process by which a computer searches for a string of characters within a text. He also pursued work in digital typography, structural documentation and literate programming. Knuth’s Magnum Opus, "The Art of Computer Programming", till today, remains a standard addition to every programmers book shelf. Additional information: http://www.algana.co.uk/Algorithms/Strings/StringsFrameset.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
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