"I cannot describe the excitement I felt when my own first article "Multidimensional Binary Search Trees Used for Associative Searching" was published in Septem

"I cannot describe the excitement I felt when my own first article "Multidimensional Binary Search Trees Used for Associative Searching" was published in September 1975. It received second place in the 1975 Forsythe Student Paper Competition. Back then, original research papers were viewed as within the reach of undergraduate students (truth be told, I tied with a high school student) and of interest to the general ACM community. I wrote my paper (under the guidance of Donald Knuth) explicitly for the Competition; had it not existed, I would not have written it. It remains to this day my most cited research paper. (And because I’m sure that your inquiring mind wants to know, I’ll point out that first place went to a lad by the name of Guy Steele, who I’m betting turned out okay." This excerpt is from his most recent article on acm, "In the realm of insight and creativity".