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Donald Knuth
Donald E. Knuth (
), Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.
Father of The Art of Computer Programming and $\mathrm{\TeX}$ as two achievements only in a myriad (including MMIX for TAOCP or METAFONT for $\mathrm{\TeX}$), a purist, a craftsman of the intellect, a literal computer scientist, supreme coder and a mind-bogglingly productive author, geekiness turned academic, he has been aptly nicknamed "the Euler of computer science" [1].
I met him for the first time on 26 May (2009), in Oxford, at the occasion of a seminar he was giving (on priority sampling). He signed my volume 2 of TAOCP. I also met him remotely this time on 1 March (2023) for an "All Questions Answered" session and had the chance to ask him about his distance from quantum computation. His response that because it has "computation" in it does not mean that it is accessible to him, that he will not going to stop trying but will not give it a lot of time, suggests that he simply regards it as beyond his scope.
His favourites
Allegedly, according to geekchic (copied here for backup as the link occasionally went broken):
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I've watched Silver Streak. It's a strange movie to have as a favorite, but it's certainly worth an evening.
P=NP
An interesting footnote in volume 4's pre-fascicle 6A:
and then again in [2] (32):
No. I suspect that P=NP because a polytime algorithm might exist without being comprehensible (even more so than Super-K). Existence is far different from embodiment. Robertson and Seymour showed that polytime algorithms for some graph problems exist, yet are probably unknowable.
Links
- Homepage.
- @realDonaldKnuth with one post so far.
- Love at First Byte.
- Oral history interview.
- The Dawn of Rigour in the Art of Programming.
Funny
- A funny satire (acid).
- A funny commemoration (nice).
- xkcd.com/163, 342 and 816.