Knuth’s book The Art of Computer Programming “is considered the seminal work on computer science in the broadest sense, encompassing the algorithms and methods which lie at the heart of most computer systems, and doing so with uncommon depth and clarity” the jury affirms. “His impact on the theory and practice of computer science is beyond parallel.”

Knuth laid the foundation for modern compilers, the programs which translate the high-level language of programmers into the binary language of computers. Programmers are thus able to write their code in a way that is closer to how a human being thinks, and their work is then converted into the language of machines.

The new laureate is also the “father” of the analysis of algorithms, that is, the set of instructions conveyed to a computer so it carries out a given task. “Algorithms”, as the jury clarifies, “are at the heart of today’s digital world, underlying everything we do with a computer”. Knuth systematized software design and “erected the scaffolding on which we build modern computer programs”.

Knuth’s nomination was put forward by John L. Hennessy, President of Stanford University, and endorsed by professors Richard Karp (University of California at Berkeley, United States); Philippe Flajolet of the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA, France); Kurt Mehlhorn (Max Planck Institute, Germany); Christos Papadimitriou (University of California at Berkeley, United States); Robert Tarjan (Princeton University, United States); Leslie Valiant (Harvard University, United States), and Andrew Yao (Tsinghua University, China).

Knuth’s devotion to his work

Donald Knuth (1938, Wisconsin) has since 1993 served as Professor Emeritus at Stanford University (United States), which he joined as a professor at the age of thirty. Officially retired, he still devotes much of his time to the monumental ‘The Art of Computer Programming’, a series he began work on in 1962 with three volumes published to date – in 1968, 1969 and 1973. Coincidentally, volume 4A of the series has just come off the press and Knuth hopes to receive his copy today, as he remarked during the phone conversation when he was informed of the Frontiers award.

Knuth’s devotion to his work is so all-absorbing that he avoids any kind of distraction, including e-mail. He states this plainly on his website: “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an e-mail address. (…) What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”

Knuth’s distinctive personality is well known in the scientific community. As a child he played with this father’s calculators – Knuth senior was a high school book-keeping teacher ­– struggling to find the square root of 10 by trial and error. But later, studying at the Lutheran College in Milwaukee, the teenage Knuth did not feel particularly drawn to mathematics, and in fact was concerned that his far-from-brilliant subject grades would keep him out of university. This evidently ungrounded fear was rooted in what he now admits was an inferiority complex, which obliged him to work double: he got into Case University with the best grades then on record. And it was there that one of his teachers won him over to mathematics at the expense of physics – Knuth, it seemed, was not cut out to be an experimental scientist.

In 1963, he obtained a PhD in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and began to work there as associate professor. By that time, he had accepted a commission to write a book on compilers, which would later become the multi-volume ‘The Art of Computer Programming’.

The reason it took so long to complete The Art of Computer Programming is that “there are so many new things being discovered. There is an enormous amount of material that I think is always going to be important”.

Despite being a founder member of one of the boom fields of the past decades, Knuth has not lost his sense of wonder: “Everything about computers today surprises me, there wasn’t a single thing that I could have predicted 30 years ago.”