From: John Conover <john@email.johncon.com>
Subject: forwarded message from Reminder Service
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 00:40:16 -0800
Today is Donald Knuth's birthday. Knuth (the 'K' is pronounced,) is
the only person to win the ACM award twice. Invented the soundex
algorithm (don't you know what that is?-it is the phonetic algorithm
by which your spell checker figures out the word you think you
typed-so far, it has only been worked out for English, Norwegian, and
German-no Asian languages-I don't have any idea how they write
things,) and wrote the three volume "bibles" of computer programming,
"Fundamental Algorithms," (which are still in print-and used as
texts.) Considered by many as the father of modern computer
science. Still at Stanford. Tenure is professor of mathematics, and
all around nice guy. Oh, BTW, he invented the word processor,
also-which constitutes an estimated 70% of PC computing, today. (Also
wrote the first typesetting system, similar to Adobe, called
TeX/Metafont-which is still a work horse in the printing/publishing
industry.) Highly regarded as one of the architects of what modern
computing is today. (His first publication, BTW, was in MAD
magazine-thanks for sharing that, huh?) Quite a musician, to boot.
John
BTW, Knuth has a very dry sense of humor-the documentation to the
sources to the program TeX, which is very formally written, has an
index entry "infinite loop: see loop, infinite." You guessed it, the
corresponding index entry is "loop, infinite: see infinite loop."
--
John Conover, john@email.johncon.com, http://www.johncon.com/