Donald Knuth

Born 1938 · American computer scientist · Stanford professor emeritus

Donald Ervin Knuth (born 10 January 1938) is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, best known for the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming and for creating the TeX typesetting system. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1974 — the same year he published both texts in which this sentence appears. Knuth is a meticulous citer of sources, which makes the central irony here delicious: the one attribution he got wrong was his own.

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“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”

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