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Donald Erwin Knuth is an American scientist, Professor Emeritus of Stanford University and several other universities in different countries, a teacher and ideologist of programming, the author of 19 monographs (including a number of classic books on programming) and more than 160 articles, the developer of several well-known software technologies. He is the author of the world-famous series of books devoted to the basic algorithms and methods of computational mathematics, as well as the creator of the desktop publishing systems TEX and METAFONT, intended for the collection and layout of books on technical topics (first of all, physical and mathematical).

Donald Knut was born on January 10, 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father taught accounting at the university and also worked at home, in the basement, in printing. As a child, Knut enjoyed playing with his father’s calculator, who could multiply ten-digit numbers, but it would take him ten to twenty seconds to print the answer.

Knut recalls how he tried to extract the square root of ten, tried and was mistaken. Having discovered that the answer is between 3.16 and 3.17, he concluded that the number should have a true value of n, and not 3.14, as stated in his textbook. He soon realized that his conclusion was wrong.
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Knut's love of mathematics increased in the first year of study at the university. He was captured by the graphics of algebraic functions - the area of ​​endless possibilities.

He also liked physics, and he was torn between her and music - he was seriously learning to play the piano, he himself wrote several works. Knut admits that he has an inferiority complex. That explains, he says, that he always worked hard. In high school at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, he was worried that low math grades could prevent him from entering college, but it was an incomprehensible concern, as he finished school with the highest ratio ever. 97.5%.

In 1956, he enrolled at the Cleveland Kei Institute of Technology. In the first year of study, he took up higher mathematics. Again, because of the fear of not being able to cope, Knut, in extra time, eagerly studied differential and integral calculus and analytic geometry.

During the holidays after the first course Knut first took up work with a computer. He had a task for the summer - to build graphs for statisticians Case. In the next room was the new IBM 650 machine. Knut was so excited about it that he dedicated the “Art of Programming” to the IBM 650 computer installed at the Kay Institute of Technology in memory of many pleasant evenings. Some of his teachers advised him to stay away from computers, arguing that this would not lead to anything good. But curiosity got the better, he spent the nights all the time with the computer.

Knut easily left physics. His laboratory work did not seem to bring satisfaction, he dropped the parts on the floor and often turned out to be the last. Welding was a disaster: with a height of 6 feet and 4 inches, he was too high for welding tables, and he could not observe the work, moreover, the glasses did not suit him.

Knut achieved success using a computer to evaluate the game of the basketball team, of which he was the manager. He developed a complex formula for ranking players, counting the contribution of each to the game, not only by the number of points that he brought to the team. Knut usually sat at the IBM 650 computer and let down the game statistics, while the coach was standing nearby. Using the program of D. Knuth, the coach could determine the True contribution of everyone to the game and use the players accordingly. It also turned out that this program stimulated players to work more efficiently. In 1960, the Keysky Institute won the league championship, and Knut's magic formula was unexpectedly published in Walter Cronkite's Sunday and in Newsweek.

In 1960, Knut received a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and the students even voted to award him the degree of doctor. In the summer of this year in Passadena, Knut took up work on system programming, the result of which was the creation of a compiler for ALGOL. For this work, he received 5.5 thousand dollars. In the fall of the same year, he enrolled at the California Institute of Technology to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics.

In January 1962, Addison-Wesley publishing house offered Knut to write a book on compilers. He accepted this offer.

In June 1963, at the California Institute of Technology, Knut was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics and became an assistant professor. Soon he begins work on the chapters of his book.

Being in its infancy, computer science of that time suffered from a lack of specialized literature, which was also heterogeneous. Knut discovered that many of the published articles were wrong. Thousands of programmers wrote new algorithms for mainframes. But when a good thought came, it was lost in a magazine or a technical report. Many programs are simply not read. The result was that people re-discovered methods that were already known. Whip had the idea that it would be useful to have a general picture of all this valuable literature. He learned that those who had previously tried to summarize the programming technique were biased on the basis of their own theories. Not having developed any of the new ideas, but already sure that he was a good writer, Knut felt that it was he who was suitable for this work.

Knuth's goal in this monumental work was to summarize the programming technique and find an appropriate application for it. His main contribution was the synthesis of material and analysis of methods. He tried to develop the most used theories for different methods and fill in the gaps in these theories; he was the first to find these gaps and collect all these scattered theories. At first, Knut thought that he would only write one book on compilers. Having scribbled several chapters, however, he felt that the book should be much larger and fundamental. After receiving a green light from the publisher, he wrote, wrote and wrote. By June 1965 He completed the first draft of twelve chapters, which was placed on three thousand pages of handwritten text. In October, he sent the first chapter to the publisher. Addison-Wesley suggested that twelve parts be published as seven separate volumes, each containing one or Two sections. Knut suited such a proposal.

Having spent intense days and nights over the implementation of the seven-volume project, Knut experienced several attacks of the ulcer in the summer of 1967. As he recalls, it happened in the middle of the “Euclidean algorithm”, on page 333 of the second volume.

These publications, as it turned out, had the greatest demand from all the books sold by Addison-Wesley. In the mid-1980s, two thousand copies of each of the three volumes diverged over the course of a month, and this figure has not changed since the mid-1970s. The work was translated into Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Spanish and Russian, the publication was planned in Portuguese and Hungarian. Knut is becoming more and more famous: in 1979, at the age of 41, he received from the hands of President J. Carter the National Medal of Science for his work on algorithms.

Despite his impressiveness, Knut speaks quickly, his hands are in constant motion. Music is of great interest to him. He became a baroque 1000-pipe organ designer for the Lutheran church at Menlo Park in California and built a smaller version for his home. Since 1968, he has been a member of the faculty council at Stanford University as a professor in computer science.

It may seem implausible, but D. Knut also writes fantastic things. His short story “Surreal numbers: how two former students took up pure mathematics and found complete happiness” was published by Addison-Wesley in 1974. The book describes the study of the new number system, opened at Cambridge University by J. Conway. Knut learned about this system from Conway himself in 1972. One journalist noted that the first significant discovery in mathematics is described first in science fiction. Knut wrote this book not to preach Conway’s theory, but to explain how a person can create such a theory.

In the spring of 1977, Donald Knut drastically changed his occupation. Looking through the proofs of the checked edition of the second volume, he suddenly felt that the printing industry needed a radical change. He wanted to destroy these galley, because they looked terrible. The spatial arrangement of signs was bad, and the standard font and the type of mathematical equations were a particularly acute problem in the publication. Knut wanted to understand why the print work in which the photo-reproductive font was used was so unattractive. He decided to devote several months to trying to combine mathematics and computer science with the task of improving the appearance of books. The project lasted nine years!

Whip invented TeX, the first publishing system, and METAFONT, a system that uses classical mathematics to give fonts an appearance. TeX was named one of the most important inventions in the history of book printing. Some compared it in meaning with the Bible by Johann Guttenberg, which embarrassed Knut.

TeX allows the typewriter to place letters and signs on a page with considerable flexibility and aesthetic quality.

METAFONT allows the designer to create a font or font set, complete with letters, numbers and punctuation in a specific style. The font set can be displayed on the monitor and can be changed in any way.

Knut introduced both programs in open use: neither he nor Stanford University earned a penny on them. He wrote programs, as he says, for the love of books and to achieve the necessary aesthetics.

When Knut coagulated the second volume of “The Art of Programming” using METAFONT and TeX, the result was better, but not perfect. The numbers were bad. So he spent another five years working with the best graphic designers in order to create new systems and make the most of their potential. In the summer of 1986 Knut’s designs for the printing house were completed, and the five-volume “Computers and character set” was released. The first volume is dedicated to TeX; the second contains a complete source of TeX codes; the third and fourth, respectively, are devoted to METAFONT and the complete source of codes for it; The fifth volume contains more than 500 METAFONT programming examples.

In 1986, at a reception at the Addison-Wesley publishing house, arranged in his honor, he was asked: “Will his seven-volume book be completed, will the four missing volumes be added?” He replied that it would take them another twenty years to write.

Thirteen years have passed. In 1999, Professor Knut stated that he intended to add two more volumes to the existing three volumes. In addition, he decided to replace the virtual computer model MIX 1009 (a model similar to real computers from the late 60s - early 70s), in the language of which most of the algorithms of the first three volumes are written, with the new model - 64-bit MMIX 2009 processor with RISC architecture. In the next editions of The Art of Programming, examples will be given in the MMIX assembly language.

Donald Knut believes that the study of computer language is still necessary for the programmer, because you need to know what the high-level language constructions will be translated into and what the hardware is. Otherwise, according to Professor Knuth, the programs will be very strange.

The number 2009 is the arithmetic average of the numbers of fourteen processors. Among them - CRAY I, IBM 701, Alpha 21264, MIPS 4000, StrongArm 110, Sparc 64, and others. The MMIX logical model describes in some detail the behavior of this processor. For example, for each command, the number of ticks required for execution is specified, the processor behavior is determined in situations such as incorrect branch prediction or cache miss. The model has a set of variable parameters, so in fact MMIX is a whole family of compatible processors. Professor Knut intends to implement a meta-simulator for the whole family, so that you can change the parameters of the model and investigate the behavior of the programs.

Donald Knut has already developed a processor architecture, a simple simulator and an assembler. The first edition of the instruction set description was published in February, and the fourth edition of the MMIX introduction was released at the end of June. Now we have to transfer the entire accumulated software stock of the old MIX to the new MMIS RISC processor. Donald Knut invites volunteers from around the world, especially students, to cooperate.