Presentation about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist.

1. Donald Knuth
Scientists in IT

2. Biography
Born on January 10, 1938
He is an American computer
scientist, mathematician, and
professor emeritus at Stanford
University.

3. The Art of Computer Programming
Comprehensive
monograph written by
Donald Knuth that
covers many kinds of
programming
algorithms and their
analysis.

4. The Art of Computer Programming
Knuth began the project, originally conceived as a single book with twelve chapters,
in 1962.
Volume 1 – Fundamental Algorithms (chapters 1 and 2)
Volume 2 – Seminumerical Algorithms (chapters 3 and 4)
Volume 3 – Sorting and Searching (chapters 5 and 6)
Volume 4 – Combinatorial Algorithms (chapters 7 and 8 released in several
subvolumes)
Volume 5 – Syntactic Algorithms (as of 2011, estimated for release in 2020)
(chapters 9 and 10)
Volume 6 – The Theory of Context-Free Languages (planned)
Volume 7 – Compiler Techniques (planned)

5. Big O
In the process of writing the book he also
popularized the asymptotic notation (Big O
notation) - it characterizes functions according
to their growth rates: different functions with
the same growth rate may be represented
using the same O notation. The letter O is
used because the growth rate of a function is
also referred to as order of the function.

6. TeX
Donald Knuth was so frustrating about modern electronic
publishing tools publishing tools while writing his monograph
“The art of Computer Programming” that he decided to develop
his own computer typesetting system TeX.
Now we know it mostly as LaTeX as the a set of macro
expansion for TeX.

7. Software Patents
As a member of the academic and scientific
community, Knuth is strongly opposed to the
policy of granting software patents.

8. Software Patents
Knuth:
I’m against patents on things
that any student should be expected to
discover. There have been an awful lot
of software patents in the U.S. for ideas
that are completely trivial, and that
bothers me a lot. There is an organiza-
tion that has worked for many years to
make patents on all the remaining triv-
ial ideas and then make these available
to everyone. The way patenting had
been going was threatening to make
the software industry stand still.
Quote from “All Questions Answered,
Volume 49 #3” magazine
http://www.ams.org/notices/200203/fea-
knuth.pdf