Don Knuth is 70

Alonzo Church and Alan Turing imagined programming languages and computing machines, and studied their limitations, in the 1930s; computers started appearing in the 1940s; but it took until the 1960s for computer science to become its own discipline, and to provide a common place for the logicians, combinatorialists, electrical engineers, operations researchers, and others, who had been studying the uses and limitations of computers. That was a time when giants were roaming the Earth, and when results that we now see as timeless classics were discovered.

Don Knuth is one of the most revered of the great researchers of that time. A sort of pop-culture icon to a certain geek set (see for example these two xkcd comics here and here, and this story). Beyond his monumental accomplishments, his eccentricities, and humor are the stuff of legends. (Like, say, the fact that he does not use email, or how he optmized the layout of his kitchen.)

As a member of a community whose life is punctuated by twice-yearly conferences, what I find most inspiring about Knuth is his dedication to perfection, whatever time it might take to achieve it.

As the well known story goes, more than forty years ago Knuth was asked to write a book about compilers. As initial drafts started to run into the thousands of pages, it was decided the "book" would become a seven-volume series, The Art of Computer Programming, the first three of which appeared between 1968 and 1973. An unparalleled in-depth treatment of algorithms and data structures, the books defined the field of analysis of algorithms.

At this point Knuth became frustrated with the quality of electronic typesetting systems, and decided he had to take matters in his own hands. In 1977 he started working on what would become TeX and METAFONT, a development that was completed only in 1989. Starting from scratch, he created a complete document preparation system (TeX) which became the universal standard for writing documents with mathematical content, along the way devising new algorithms for formatting paragraphs of texts. To generate the fonts to go with it, he created METAFONT, which is a system that converts a geometric description of a character into a bit-map representation usable by TeX. (New algorithmic work arose from METAFONT too.) And since he was not satisfied with the existing tools available to write a large program involving several non-trivial algorithms, he came up with the notion of "literate programming" and wrote an environment to support it. It is really too bad that he was satisfied enough with the operating system he was using.

One now takes TeX for granted, but try to imagine a world without it. One shudders at the thought. We would probably be writing scientific articles in Word, and I would have probably spent the last month reading STOC submissions written in Comic Sans.

Knuth has made mathematical exposition his life work. We may never see again a work of the breadth, ambition, and success of The Art of Computer Programming, but as theoretical computer science broadens and deepens, it is vital that each generation cherishes the work of accumulating, elaborating, systematizing and synthesizing knowledge, so that we may preserve the unity of our field.

Don Knuth turns 70 tomorrow. I would send him my best wishes by email, but that wouldn't work...

[This post is part of a "blogfest" conceived and coordinated by Jeff Shallit, with posts by Jeff, Scott Aaronson, Mark Chu-Carroll, David Eppstein, Bill Gasarch, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, and Doron Zeilberger.]