Early life Donald Knuth was born in
Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, to Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning. He describes his heritage as "Midwestern Lutheran German". His father owned a small printing business and taught bookkeeping. While a student at
Milwaukee Lutheran High School, Knuth thought of ingenious ways to solve problems. For example, in eighth grade, he entered a contest to find the number of words that the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar" could be rearranged to create; the judges had identified 2,500 such words. With time gained away from school due to a fake stomachache, Knuth used an unabridged dictionary and determined whether each dictionary entry could be formed using the letters in the phrase. He identified over 4,500 words, winning the contest. As prizes, the school received a new television and enough candy bars for all of his schoolmates to eat.
Education Knuth received a scholarship in physics to the Case Institute of Technology (now part of
Case Western Reserve University) in
Cleveland, Ohio, enrolling in 1956. He also joined the Beta Nu Chapter of the
Theta Chi fraternity. While studying physics at Case, Knuth was introduced to the
IBM 650, an early commercial
computer. After reading the computer's manual, Knuth decided to rewrite the
assembly and
compiler code for the machine used in his school because he believed he could do it better. In 1958, Knuth created a program to help his school's basketball team win its games. He assigned "values" to players in order to gauge their probability of scoring points, a novel approach that
Newsweek and
CBS Evening News later reported on. He then switched from physics to mathematics, and received two degrees from Case in 1960: In 1963, with mathematician
Marshall Hall as his adviser,
Early work In 1963, after receiving his PhD, Knuth joined Caltech's faculty as an assistant professor. Knuth had a long association with Burroughs as a consultant from 1960 to 1968 until his move into more academic work at Stanford in 1969. In 1962, Knuth accepted a commission from
Addison-Wesley to write a book on computer
programming language compilers. While working on this project, he decided that he could not adequately treat the topic without first developing a fundamental theory of computer programming, which became
The Art of Computer Programming. He originally planned to publish this as a single book, but as he developed his outline for the book, he concluded that he required six volumes, and then seven, to thoroughly cover the subject. He published the first volume in 1968. Just before publishing the first volume of
The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth left Caltech to accept employment with the
Institute for Defense Analyses' Communications Research Division, then situated on the
Princeton campus, which was performing mathematical research in
cryptography to support the
National Security Agency. In 1967, Knuth attended a
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference and someone asked what he did. At the time, computer science was partitioned into
numerical analysis,
artificial intelligence, and
programming languages. Based on his study and
The Art of Computer Programming book, Knuth decided the next time someone asked he would say, "Analysis of algorithms". In 1969, Knuth left his position at Princeton to join the
Stanford University faculty, where he became
Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science in 1977. He became Professor of The Art of Computer Programming in 1990, and has been emeritus since 1993. == Writings ==