Knuth is a towering figure in computer science, widely considered "father" of the analysis of algorithms, attribute grammars, empirical study of programming languages, and literate programming - the notion that computer programs should be readable by and understandable to non-programmer humans as well as machines. As a Stanford professor, Knuth introduced a variety of new courses into the curriculum, notably Concrete Mathematics, and has mentored numerous doctoral scholars.

Donald Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to the owner of a small printing business. In the eighth grade, Knuth found over 4,500 words in a contest to use the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar" - almost twice the number the judges themselves had - winning for his school a television set and a candy bar for each of his classmates.

In college at Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University), Knuth chose physics over music, but later switched to mathematics, publishing several papers as an undergraduate. On graduation day in 1960, he received his bachelor's of science degree and, by a special award of the faculty who considered his work outstanding, his master's degree. It was while an undergraduate at Case that Knuth was first hired to write compilers for computer systems. He worked on an IBM Type 650.

In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cal Tech and began work on a magnum opus: The Art of Computer Programming, now in the fourth volume of still-in-progress seven-volume treatise that organizes and summarizes all that is known about the vast subject of computer methods and provides firm mathematical and historical foundations for the field.

In 1968, the year he joined the Stanford University, Knuth published the first volume. The second and third volumes came in 1969 and 1973. The fourth was published in 2005, delayed in part because of Knuth's insistance on elegance and rigor, and because, in 1976, ever the son of a typesetter and frustrated with early electronic publishing tools, Knuth set aside his book "temporarily" to create the TeX and METAFONT typesetting tools. That detour would last a decade.

On January 1, 1990, Knuth renounced e-mail to concentrate on The Art of Computer Programming. He then retired from teaching in 1993 to work full-time on his book. Today, his singular work has been translated into [10] languages and over a million copies have been sold. The dedication reads, "This series of books is affectionately dedicated to the Type 650 computer once installed at Case Institute of Technology in remembrance of many pleasant evenings."

Knuth has been honored with virtually every honor bestowable: the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the John von Neumann Medal, and the Kyoto Prize. He is an associate of the French Academy of Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and, in 2009, was elected in the first class of Fellows to the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for his outstanding contributions to mathematics.

Computer Musings by Professor Donald E. Knuth - an online collection of recorded musings, lectures, and assorted classes.

Professor: 1968-1993