Cultivating His Eccentricities
Some might say his meticulousness is another one of his eccentricities, like how he writes checks for $2.56 - one "hexadecimal" dollar, representing the system of shorthand for binary code - to anyone who catches mistakes in his books.
"You have to cultivate a few eccentricities," he says, though some might say the incentive is just plain generosity. It's certainly characteristic of Knuth, evident in his decision to propagate two of his typesetting programs as open-source.
For 10 years, Knuth took a break from writing to create TeX and METAFONT, two programs that aid the process of typsetting scientific research papers. He developed the software at Stanford, inspired by difficulties in formatting some of his work on mathematical theorems.
One problem dubbed the "big bang," describing what happens as connections are continuously added between points in a line, often kept Knuth awake. Just after 4 a.m. one morning in 1992, he "saw" the problem at the moment the points coalesced, determining what happens immediately before and after the collision.
The next day, Bill Gates came to Stanford with the intention of donating money for the construction of the school's new computer science building. Knuth says he raced to present his research to a class where Gates was sitting in.
"Bill was happy to see it," he says. "The next day, he signed a contract."
By 1993, Knuth retired from Stanford as a Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming. One of his most memorable moments, he says, was receiving the National Medal of Science from President Carter in 1979. And winning the Kyoto Prize in 1996 was like winning the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
"It's like that famous statement," he says. "The hardest thing to do when writing a book is to figure out where to start. It's the same thing with a computer program. You have to try to get everything up to speed, but you just don't know what it will ultimately be like."
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