Donald E. Knuth was born on January 10, 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Hestudied mathematics as an undergraduate at Case Institute of Technology, wherehe also wrote software at the Computing Center. The Case faculty tookthe unprecendented step of awarding him a Master's degree together with theB.S. he received in 1960. After graduate studies at California Institute ofTechnology, he received a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1963 and then remainedon the mathematics faculty. Throughout this period he continued to be involvedwith software development, serving as consultant to Burroughs Corporation from1960—1968 and as editor of Programming Languages for ACM publications from1964—1967.

He joined Stanford University as Professor of Computer Science in 1968, andwas appointed to Stanford's first endowed chair in computer science nine yearslater. As a university professor he introduced a variety of new courses intothe curriculum, notably Data Structures and Concrete Mathematics. In 1993 hebecame Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming. He has supervisedthe dissertations of 28 students.

Knuth began in 1962 to prepare textbooks about programming techniques, and thiswork evolved into a projected seven-volume series entitled The Art ofComputer Programming. Volumes 1—3 appeared in 1968, 1969, and 1973, and he isnow working full time on the remaining volumes. Approximately one millioncopies have already been printed, including translations into six languages.He took ten years off from this project to work on digital typography,developing the T_eX system for document preparation and the MF system foralphabet design. Noteworthy byproducts of those activities were the WEBand CWEB languages for structured documentation, and the accompanyingmethodology of Literate Programming. T_eX is now used to produce most of theworld's scientific literature in physics and mathematics.

His research papers have been instrumental in establishing several subareas ofcomputer science and software engineering: LR$(k)$ parsing; attribute grammars;the Knuth—Bendix algorithm for axiomatic reasoning; empirical studies of userprograms and profiles; analysis of algorithms. In general, his works have beendirected towards the search for a proper balance between theory and practice.

Professor Knuth received the ACM Turing Award in 1974 and became a Fellowof the British Computer Society in 1980, an HonoraryMember of the IEEE in 1982. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts andSciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy ofEngineering, and a foreign associate of l'Académie des Sciences (Paris),Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi (Oslo), and the Bayerische Akademie derWissenschaften (Munich). He holds 5 patents and has publishedapproximately 160 papers in addition to his 23 books. He received the Medal ofScience from President Carter in 1979, the American Mathematical Society'sSteele Prize for expository writing in 1986, the New York Academy of SciencesAward in 1987, the J. D. Warnier Prize for software methodology in 1989,the Adelsköld Medal from the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1994, theHarvey Prize from the Technion in 1995, and the Kyoto Prize for advancedtechnology in 1996. He wasa charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1982, after havingreceived the IEEE Computer Society's W. Wallace McDowell Award in 1980; hereceived the IEEE's John von Neumann Medal in 1995. Heholds honorary doctorates from Oxford University, the University of Paris,the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm,St. Petersburg University, the University of Tübingen,the University of Oslo,and more than a dozen colleges and universities in America.

Professor Knuth lives on the Stanford campus with his wife, Jill. They have twochildren, John and Jennifer. Music is his main avocation.

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