Can't vouch for this book, but coincidentally just read about it today-- "The Essential Knuth" by Knuth, Daylight, and DeGrave. Donald E. Knuth lived two separ

Can't vouch for this book, but coincidentally just read about it today-- "The Essential Knuth" by Knuth, Daylight, and DeGrave. Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected! -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a mathematician, I was doing integrals or maybe was learning about Fermat's number theory, but I wasn't manipulating symbols the way I did when I was writing a compiler. With Chomsky, wow, I was actually doing mathematics and computer science simultaneously."