DOI: 10.1145/1364782.1364794
In this first of a two-part talk, the renowned scholar and computer scientist reflects on the influences that set the course for his extraordinary career.
THE COMPUTER HISTORY Museum has an active program to gather videotaped histories from people who have done pioneering work in this first century of the information age. These tapes are a rich aggregation of stories that are preserved in the collection, transcribed, and made available on the Web to researchers, students, and anyone curious about how invention happens.
The oral histories are conversations about people’s lives. We want to know about their upbringing, their families, their education, and their jobs. But above all, we want to know how they came to the passion and creativity that leads to innovation.
Presented here in two installments (concluding next month) are excerptsa from an interview conducted by Edward Feigenbaum in March 2007 of Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. — L. S.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMO THY ARCHIBALD
Don talks about his family background. My father was the first person among all his ancestors who had gone to college. My mother was the first person in all of her ancestors who had gone to a
a Oral histories are not scripted, and a transcript of casual speech is very different from what one would write. I have taken the liberty of editing and reordering freely for presentation. For the original transcript, see http://archive. computerhistory.org/search/oh/
scared that I was going to flunk out, but still I was ready to work.
year of school to learn how to be a typist. My great-grandfather was a blacksmith. There was no tradition in our family of higher education at all. These people were pretty smart, but they didn’t have an academic background.
Some people know from an early age what they want to do. Don didn’t, but he knew he wanted to work hard. My main interest in those days was music. But at the college where I had been admitted, people emphasized how easy it was going to be there as a music major. When I got the chance to go to Case Institute of Technology in Ohio instead, I was intrigued by the idea that Case was going to make me work hard. I was
In my sophomore year in physics I had to take a required class of welding. Welding was so scary and I was a miserable failure at it, so I decided maybe I can’t be a physicist. On the other hand—mathematics! In the sophomore year for mathematicians, they give you courses on what we now call discrete mathematics, where you study logic and things that are integers instead of continuous quantities. I was drawn to that. That was something, somehow, that had great appeal to me. I think that there is something strange inside my head. It’s clear that I have much better intuition about discrete things than continuous things. In physics, for example, I could pass the exams and I could do the problems in quantum mechanics, but I couldn’t intuit what I was doing. But on the other hand, in my discrete math class, these were things that really seemed a part of me. There’s definitely something in how I had developed by the time I was a teenager that made me understand discrete objects, like zeros and ones of course, or things that are made out of alphabetical letters, much better than things like Fourier transforms or waves.
I’m visualizing the symbols. To me, the symbols are reality, in a way. I take
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