Donald Knuth

Knuth has published Volumes 1 through 4A, with Volume 4B appearing in recent years, out of a planned seven-volume series that he began in 1962. The project remains incomplete, and Knuth, now in his eighties, continues to write new fascicles for Volume 4 and has stated he intends to work on Volume 5 covering syntactic algorithms.

Knuth created TeX in the late 1970s because he was dissatisfied with the typesetting quality of the second edition of Volume 2 of 'The Art of Computer Programming' after it was reset in a new phototypesetting system. TeX and its macro package LaTeX are now the standard typesetting systems for mathematical and scientific papers worldwide, used by virtually every major academic publisher.

Knuth offers a reward of $2.56—one 'hexadecimal dollar'—for each technical or typographical error found in his published works, and he has been sending checks or certificates since the 1970s. He originally offered larger amounts but found it unsustainable, and many recipients frame the checks rather than cashing them.

Knuth is widely regarded as the father of the analysis of algorithms, having systematized the mathematical study of computational complexity and popularized Big-O notation for expressing algorithmic performance. His work on context-free grammars, LR parsing, and the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm remain foundational topics in undergraduate computer science curricula.