Donald Knuth

His father ran a small printing shop in Milwaukee and taught bookkeeping, and the son turned out to be the sort of eighth grader who wins things. A candy company offered a prize for the most words that could be made from the letters in Ziegler's Giant Bar. The judges had a list of 2,500. Knuth faked a stomachache to stay home, worked through an unabridged dictionary, turned in more than 4,500 and won a television set for the school and a candy bar for everyone in it. At Case he read the manual for an IBM 650, concluded he could write a better compiler than the one his school was using, and did. Case handed him a bachelor's and a master's at the same time in 1960.

Addison-Wesley asked him in 1962 for a book about compilers. He decided the field needed a foundation first, and The Art of Computer Programming grew from one book of twelve chapters into a projected seven volumes, the first three of which appeared in 1968, 1969 and 1973. The work established the analysis of algorithms as a subject and put asymptotic notation into general use. Then his publisher switched to phototypesetting and the new printings came out worse than the old ones, so he stopped writing and spent most of a decade building his own system instead: TeX, released in 1978, the METAFONT language for designing letterforms, and the Computer Modern typefaces, all given away free. Along the way he invented literate programming, published his source code as books, and designed the machines his algorithms run on.

The book is 64 years old and unfinished. Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4A and 4B are out, the most recent installment appeared in February 2025, and volume four alone is now projected to run from part A through part F. Some of that is the decade he gave to typography. Some of it is that he took the analysis seriously enough that the subject kept growing underneath him. There were other detours he liked less — he wrote a FORTRAN compiler for Univac in 1962 and said afterward that he had sold his soul to the devil — and one that is rarely mentioned. Just before the first volume appeared he left Caltech for the Institute for Defense Analyses at Princeton, doing the cryptographic mathematics that supported the National Security Agency.

He has already written his own ending. TeX's version numbers converge on pi — the current one is 3.141592653, set in 2021 — and METAFONT's converge on e, and Knuth has stated that the final change to each, to be made after he dies, will be to set the number to the constant exactly, at which point every remaining bug becomes a feature. He has kept a numbered log of TeX's errors since 1982, which stands at 440. He paid 2.56 dollars for any mistake found in his books, on the grounds that 256 pennies make a hexadecimal dollar, and stopped mailing real checks in 2008 after bank fraud. Most recipients framed them rather than cashing them anyway.

Donald Knuth's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures article
  Published in Mad No. 33, with the thickness of Mad No. 26 as the unit of length 1957
• The Art of Computer Programming book
  Begun in 1962 and still in progress — volumes 1, 2, 3, 4A and 4B published 1968
• Surreal Numbers book
  A novelette about two people deriving John Conway's number system 1974
• TeX invention
  The typesetting system he built rather than accept bad phototype 1978
• TeX: The Program book
  The source code published as a book, in the literate style he invented 1986
• Concrete Mathematics book
  With Ronald Graham and Oren Patashnik, out of a course he began in 1970 1988

• June 1957 aged 19 Publishes his first article, in Mad magazine The Potrzebie System defined the unit of force as the whatmeworry.
• 1960 aged ~22 Case awards him a bachelor's and a master's degree simultaneously The faculty made the second award because it considered his work exceptional.
• June 24, 1961 aged 23 Marries Nancy Jill Carter while a graduate student at Caltech
• 1962 aged ~24 Accepts a commission for a book on compilers It turned into The Art of Computer Programming, which he is still writing.
• 1968 aged ~30 Publishes volume one and leaves Caltech for the Institute for Defense Analyses The Princeton division did cryptographic mathematics in support of the NSA.
• 1969 aged ~31 Joins the Stanford faculty
• May 13, 1977 aged 39 Writes himself a memo describing a typesetting system TeX followed in 1978. He did not consider the language settled until 1989.
• 1990 aged ~52 Stanford creates the title Professor of The Art of Computer Programming He retired from teaching in 1993 to finish the book.
• January 10, 2018 aged 80 Fantasia Apocalyptica premieres in Sweden on his 80th birthday He describes the organ work as a translation of the Book of Revelation into music.

• Claude Shannon 1916–2001
  Mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, the basis of all digital communication. built on his theory
• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. predecessor in the machine
• John McCarthy 1927–2011
  Coined the term artificial intelligence and created the Lisp programming language. Stanford contemporary
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. earlier compiler pioneer
• Dennis Ritchie 1941–2011
  Created the C programming language and co-developed Unix at Bell Labs. his C successor