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> There has been NOTHING as fundamentaly important as Knuth's work in the last couple of decades. What work of Knuth's? TOACP? TeX? I'm a huge Knuth fan, but I
by llimllib 15y ago
> There has been NOTHING as fundamentaly important as Knuth's work in the last couple of decades.
What work of Knuth's? TOACP? TeX? I'm a huge Knuth fan, but I don't see his work as fundamental to computer science, rather mostly as an amazing gatherer and editor of such work.
- pointyhat 15y agoHe formalised it which is the one thing everyone else had failed before. Plus don't forget things like KMP algo, METAFONT, TeX, literate programming etc.
- pnathan 15y agoIf I recall correctly, he invented rigorous algorithm analysis in the process of writing TAOCP.
- wazoox 15y agoRead this and learn what Knuth did as his summer job in 1960 (he was 21 or 22): http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 here is the conclusion of the chapter: "In 1961, the National ACM meeting was held in Los Angeles. The keynote speaker was Tom Watson, the Chairman of the Board Of IBM. Bob Barton was the second or third speaker after Watson. don and Lloyd and I were in the audience of approximately 1200 people. [...] "There are only three people in this room that really know how to write a compiler and I would like for them to stand up now. They are don knuth, Lloyd Turner and Richard Waychoff."
- xyzzyz 15y agoYou might be interested in his resume: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/vita.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/vita.pdf
- psykotic 15y ago> I'm a huge Knuth fan, but I don't see his work as fundamental to computer science You're talking about the guy who invented LR parsing.