Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth was born on 10 January 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Case Institute of Technology in 1960 and a doctorate in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1963. In 1962 he began writing what became The Art of Computer Programming, a planned multi-volume survey of computer algorithms commissioned by the publisher Addison-Wesley; its first volume, Fundamental Algorithms, appeared in 1968, and further volumes and fascicles have continued to appear since, covering sorting, searching and combinatorial algorithms in exacting mathematical detail. Across that work Knuth developed a rigorous, mathematical approach to analyzing how an algorithm's own running time and memory use grow with the size of its input, and in a 1976 note titled Big Omicron and Big Omega and Big Theta he set out precise, now standard definitions for the asymptotic notations, including Big O notation, that computer science uses to describe that growth; the notation itself had been used by mathematicians since the nineteenth century for other purposes, and Knuth's note fixed its present meaning for the field rather than inventing it outright. Frustrated in the 1970s by the declining typographic quality of new printings of his own books, he also wrote the typesetting system TeX and the companion font system METAFONT, both still in wide use.