Knuth tidbits

A few posts ago (this one) I had dropped a reference to Donald Knuth and what he considers as the work of his lifetime, "The Art of Computer Programming", a planned 6-volume series of books on algorithms and related applications. He has been able to complete 4 of those 6 volumes, so 2 more volumes remain to be done.

I was surprised to learn from many of the readers of this blog that they did not know who Knuth is and that they had never heard of him. After a quick confirmation with my (ex)classmate, we concluded that it was indeed very surprising that today's "youngsters" haven't heard of him - during "our" days (13 years ago), there was hardly anyone using the Internet in India - and when the Internet usage is so prevalent now, this should not have been the case. I guess "youngsters" these days are busy browsing other things. (Ah I get it...its the "generation gap"...for us, Knuth, Kernighan, Ritchie and Stroustrup were god...for the current generation, it must be Johny Abraham, Rakhey Sawant, and *Khan...I can see wallpapers of these people on youngster's desktops...that's true).

Anyways, I thought I'll put together some tidbits about Knuth from the various sources now available on the Internet.

• Knuth is a computer scientist (yes, that's a new word for a "discrete" mathematics person) and now a "Professor Emeritus" at the Stanford University.
  
• He did his B.S. (in mathematics) with "summa cum laude" (the highest honors) from the Case Institute of Technology
• His work was found to be so wonderful that by a special vote of faculty, the institute decided to confer the M.S. on him simultaneously along with the B.S.
• He later went on the write 3 volumes of "The Art of Computer Programming" series. These books (in 1999) were named among the best twelve physical-science monographs by the American Scientist in the same league as "Dirac on quantum mechanics, Einstein on relativity, and Einstein's collected papers".
• On the comment's to these books, Bill Gates had announced that if one truly read the books completely and understood them, then the reader should him a resume (to be entitled for a job at Microsoft).
• Knuth has a peculiar style of rewarding readers who point out mistakes in his books: he offers them a reward of $2.56 per mistake found. The 2.56 figure is because 256 pennies make a hexadecimal dollar.
• Version numbers of his TeX software approach the number π, that is versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14 and so on. Version numbers of Metafont (another system developed by him) approach the number mathematical constant e similarly.
• He has stopped using email since 1990; he claims it helps him to concentrate better. In his own words,
  

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things."

• Besides all this, he is an accomplished Pipe Organ player; he has a custom-built pipe organ in his home (with some pipes of the organ being more than 8 feet tall).
  

For more on him or his achievements and the numerous awards that he has won, one could refer to his 35-page CV here.