Papers reflect his work in the study and teaching of computer programming, computer systems for publishing, and mathematics. Included are correspondence, notes, manuscripts, computer printouts, logbooks, proofs, and galleys pertaining to the computer systems TeX, METAFONT, and Computer Modern; and to his books The Art of Computer Programming, Computers and Typesetting, Concrete Mathematics, The Stanford Graphbase, Digital Typography, Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms, MMixware: A RISC Computer for the Third Millennium, and Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.

Donald Ervin Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process he also popularized the asymptotic notation.