Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth
Knuth in 2011
Born	Donald Ervin Knuth (1938-01-10) January 10, 1938 (age 86) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
Education	Case Institute of Technology (BS, MS) California Institute of Technology (PhD)
Known for	See list The Art of Computer Programming, TeX, METAFONT, Computer Modern, Knuth's up-arrow notation, Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm, Knuth–Bendix completion algorithm, MMIX, Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence, LR parser, Literate programming
Spouse	Nancy Jill Carter
Children	2
Awards	See list SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution (1986) Grace Murray Hopper Award (1971) Turing Award (1974) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1975) National Medal of Science (1979) John von Neumann Medal (1995) Harvey Prize (1995) Kyoto Prize (1996) Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2003)[1] Faraday Medal (2011) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2010) Turing Lecture (2011) Flajolet Lecture (2014)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics Computer science
Institutions	Stanford University University of Oslo
Thesis	Finite Semifields and Projective Planes (1963)
Doctoral advisor	Marshall Hall, Jr.[2]
Doctoral students	Leonidas J. Guibas Michael Fredman Scott Kim Vaughan Pratt Robert Sedgewick Jeffrey Vitter Andrei Broder[2]
Website	cs.stanford.edu/~knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth (/kəˈnuːθ/^[3] kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.^[4] Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".^[5]

Knuth is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. 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. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

As a writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB and CWEB computer programming systems designed to encourage and facilitate literate programming, and designed the MIX/MMIX instruction set architectures. He strongly opposes the granting of software patents, and has expressed his opinion to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organisation.