Knuth set up a bounty game. If someone found an error in the TEX program he wrote, he would reward the person who found the error. The first error is worth $2.56, the second is worth $5.12, and the third is worth $10.24. It is said that this check for $10.24 is the last one he has ever written for this purpose.
Knuth is the Chinese name of American computer scientist Donald Knuth. This "originator of modern computer science" is a legend in the computer industry. He won the Turing Award at the age of only 36, becoming the youngest winner in the history of the award. His award-winning work "The Art of Computer Programming" was originally planned to be published in seven volumes, but only the fourth volume has been published so far. Despite this, it is still ranked alongside Einstein's "Relativity", Dirac's "Quantum Mechanics", Feynman's "Quantum Electrodynamics", etc., and was selected by Scientific American magazine as one of the 12 most important physics books of the 20th century. One of the works.
1 Early experience
“To be a man, you have to be -67”
Knuth was born in Milwaukee, USA in 1938. His extraordinary intelligence was revealed at the age of 8. At that time, a candy store held an interesting competition among children, requiring them to use the letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar" to write as many words as possible. The referee prepared a list of 2,500 words in advance, but Knuth surprisingly wrote more than 4,500 words. He won a television for the school and a lollipop for each of his classmates. His post-game remarks were, I could write more.
The university where Knuth studied is Case Institute of Technology. In 1956, he used the IBM650 here for the first time and began to learn programming. Soon after, Knuth learned a lot about programming. At that time, Knuth was also managing the school's basketball team part-time, so he wrote a program that could automatically evaluate the value of each player. The team's coach appreciated it very much and attracted CBS TV. Later, a photo of Knuth, the team coach and the IBM650 was printed on the IBM650 brochure. In 1960, Knuth broke the school's practice with recognized outstanding achievements and obtained two bachelor's and master's degrees at the same time.
Subsequently, Knuth entered Berkeley to pursue a PhD in mathematics. During this period, his programming career officially began. The most noteworthy program he wrote at that time was the test method proposed for the ALGOL60 compiler. ALGOL60 often breaks down due to immature compiler. Knuth wrote a very simple test program, which is known as the "Man or boy test", which translates into Chinese as "If you are a man, you will get -67". Knuth said that as long as I use the ALGOL60 compiler to compile this program of mine, if the running result is equal to -67, it means that this compiler is purely manly.
2 Won the Turing Award
Gates "promoted" him
In 1963, the 25-year-old Knuth received his Ph.D. Taught at Berkeley. A year before graduation, Knuth was already well-known in the computer industry for designing compilers. The famous Addison-Wesley Publishing House asked him to write a book on compilers and programming. This was originally a very common thing, but soon after, he turned it into a miracle in the history of computer science. Knuth was still writing the manuscript requested in 1962 and had not yet submitted it in 1966. The editor was anxious, so he found Knuth and said, "How much have you written in these four years?" Knuth said that he only wrote 3,000 pages of manuscripts. The editor was so embarrassed that he asked why he didn't submit the manuscript after it took so long. He replied, "I haven't gotten to the point yet." The editor collapsed and said that you should publish a multi-volume book...
To do an ordinary thing to the extreme, this is Knuth. He was not being mystical; he had a lot of energy in his heart to write a masterpiece comparable to Newton's "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy". In 1968, the first volume of "The Art of Computer Programming" (TAOCP) was officially published.
The title of this volume is "Basic Algorithms", but the difficulty is not low. It is said that Bill Gates spent several months reading this volume and doing a lot of exercises. Then he said, if you want to become an excellent programmer, then read this "Basic Algorithm" . Knuth himself said it more sharply: If you can't understand, don't be a programmer.
In the same year, Knuth moved to Stanford University and became a professor. One year later, the second volume of TAOCP was officially published. In 1973, the third volume of this book was published. These three volumes were astonished by the computer industry as "masterpieces" and sold more than 1 million copies in the first few years. According to the plan, this set of books will be seven volumes in a row, but now that I have just finished three volumes, it has already shocked the past and the present. It was so shocking that even the Turing Award committee members couldn't sit still. By convention, the winners of the Turing Award are all outstanding achievements and must pass the test of the times. But at this time, the American Computer Association decided to award him the Turing Award immediately. This is undoubtedly an honor for Knuth, who is only 36 years old this year. To this day, he still holds the record as the youngest winner of the Turing Award.
3 Stopped writing midway
Pi acts as a serial number
After Knuth received this honor, he once again surprised the world: he announced that he would stop writing. Sorry, because the typesetting tools are so poor that it ruins the beauty of this book. This action shocked the outside world. Some people say that Knuth has exhausted his talents and quit when he gets good results; some people say that the Turing Award evaluated the first three volumes too high, and Knuth had to find reasons to withdraw; others say that he stopped writing after winning the award, which fully reflects his His purpose in writing books is for utility.
But Knuth actually created three important achievements in the 10 years since he stopped writing: the font design system METAFONT, literary programming (Literate Programming), and the most influential typesetting system TEX.
Writing scientific papers in the Word system is a very hard task. You need to adjust the format and it is difficult to express mathematical formulas. But in TEX, these troubles almost don't exist at all. As long as the style file is loaded, typesetting is automatically completed. TEX is a revolution in the publishing industry, and it is still the only standard for academic typesetting around the world.
As a software product, TEX is also amazing. Its version number is not a natural number sequence or a year, but starts from 3 and continues to approach pi (the latest version currently is 3.1415926). Knuth once again declared with action that this thing is approaching perfection and no major improvement is possible. He also set up a bonus: whoever finds an error in TEX will pay him $2.56, the second error $5.12, the third $10.24... and so on. As a result, to this day, he has not paid much money for it, which shows how hard TEX has gone through. Another prize he set up was $2.56 for anyone who found an error in his book, because "256 cents is exactly one dollar in hexadecimal." It is said that the winner regarded the check with his signature as a treasure and did not cash it.
4 Return to Writing
The Return of the Computer King
Knuth, who had stopped writing for ten years, returned to the world with these three achievements in hand, dispelling all doubts. At this time, he gave an understatement to the incident of stopping writing ten years ago: If a person wants to do things beautifully, he must be in harmony with God. Now, God finally asked me to write four volumes.
In 1992, in order to concentrate on writing, Knuth announced his early retirement and deactivated his e-mail address (he had been using e-mail since 1975). Knuth brought 28 doctoral students in his first year. He thought 28 was a good number, so he announced that he would no longer accept students. Despite this, he still left a hope for those who wanted to learn from him: He held a public class and asked a question every time. If anyone could solve it quickly, Knuth would give it to him. Doctoral thesis signature. I don’t know which rising star can win such an honor, we will wait and see.
In 2008, 30 years after the first three volumes of TAOCP were released, the fourth volume was finally released. But Knuth himself is already a grey-haired old man. His love for computer science made him devote his entire life to this series of books.
New Knowledge Patch
Turing Award
The highest award in computer science.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was established in 1966 to reward individuals who have made important contributions to the computer industry. It is named after the British scientist Alan Turing, a pioneer in computer science. The Turing Award is currently sponsored by Intel and Google, with a prize of US$250,000. Generally, only one computer scientist is awarded each year.
□Su Ye (Jiangsu Artificial Intelligence Major) The pictures in this page are all information pictures