The Capturer of the Boundless Interest

"Computer programming is an art form, like the creation of poetry or music."

- Donald Knuth

Even Shasha and Lazere wonder if Donald E. Knuth, born in 1938 in Milwaukee, WI, is "just one person" (89). Knuth's career officially started in 1957 when his first piece for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search on the "potrzebie system of weights and measures" was published in the Mad Magazine. He was only 19 years old at the time and still had no idea that he might be interested in computing. He studied mathematics during his undergraduate years at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, which is also where he taught himself basic programming skills. In 1960, he graduated from Case receiving a master's degree in mathematics at the same time and went on to California Institute of Technology for a PhD in the same field. After completing his PhD work, Knuth stayed as a member of the Caltech faculty now working closely with the Burroughs Corporation, alongside Dijkstra and other pioneers in the field, on hardware and software efficient problems for new-found programming languages like Algol 60. First, Knuth's work focused on compilers. More specifically, he worked on many of the tools used today to write compilers (and yes, because of Knuth, all computer science majors today have to take a compilers course at some point during their undergraduate careers). His work in this area was the perfect segue into his later work on more specific parsing problems and attribute grammars. His early work with attribute grammars branched from the recently discovered Backus-Naur form and other grammar interpretation algorithms while his later work dealt with precise analysis and automation of problem solving the results of which included the famous Knuth-Bendix algorithm on axiom-based confluent term rewriting systems. All of Knuth's work has been described comprehensively and completely in a 7-volume publication The Art of Computer Programming which, to this day, remains Knuth's legacy and his biggest contribution to the field of computer science.