Donald Ervin Knuth

Context : MCA students have two hours a week dedicated for seminar. There are 30 minute talks and 4 minute talks. Following is a summary of a 4 minute talk
Date: 12 - June 2011
Speaker: Divya Monisha D P

9999999967 is this my phone number? We will come to that later.

“God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.”.

Algorithm must be seen to be believed”.

Now algorithm, searching does it seem familiar, and yes it must be.

Donald E Knuth is called as ‘father of algorithms’. He was born on January 10 1938. At eighth grade he won a competition by writing 4,500 words from a short sentence that began with ‘z’. Whereas the judge just had 2,500 words. At age 20 he started working as an assistant in Case institute of Technology. At Age 30 he completed his Ph.D. in mathematics. So Don Knuth is renowned computer scientist and a mathematician.

While working in case institute the first computer he got to use was ‘Giant Brain’. That’s nothing but IBM 650. The first program that he wrote was a program to find five roots of fifth degree equation. God alone knows what the program meant.

Since he had achieved something in writing programs he started to write many programs and algorithms. The other program that he wrote was to find the largest prime factor. So the number mentioned above is not my mobile number but the largest prime factor that Knuth found through is program. The machine took about 11 minutes to run and give an answer.

Knuth is known for his professional humor. He played tricks in writing and executing programs. One of them is that of reversing a 10 digit number. 10 digit numbers was supposed to be entered on a console and answer must be exact reverse. Many of Knuth’s colleague tried but didn’t succeed so Knuth marched to the machine and started to enter 10 numbers that’s 0123456789and started to run the machine, the machine ran and stopped at one point when they looked to answer it was exact reverse that’s 9876543210. So the colleagues stood up gave Knuth a loud applause and said that he done it. But later they found that no matter what the number they entered the answer would always be 9876543210, now that’s because Knuth had played cheat he coded the answer onto the machine.

Since he had many pleasant moments in using IBM 650 he dedicated a series of book called “Art of computer programing”. To name a few of his books like, ‘searching and sorting’ ’tex’,’metafont’. He got about 9 awards like ‘franklin medal’ member of British ‘royalty’ and so on.

Coming to his personal life I actually wanted to correlate to what pooja said on founder of oracle that he was married and divorced four times, but Knuth seems to be man of one woman. He married Jill Knuth she is also a writer who wrote a book on liturgy. They have two children. Knuth hobby is to play pipe organ. He has got a two storey high pipe organ installed in his house. In one of his book he referred to page 405 has page of royalty and when people opened to that page they found only a picture of a pipe organ. When asked why Knuth said the pipe organ installed in his home was actually financed by a royal person.

So let me conclude with the words of Knuth that relates to us as MCA students. He said “if u spend more time on theory, is time for you to pay attention to practical things because practice improve your theory. He also said if you spend more time on practice it’s time for you to pay attention to theory because theory makes you practical.”