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He is born
Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to German-Americans Ervin Henry Knuth and Louise Marie Bohning. His father had two jobs: running a small printing company and teaching bookkeeping at Milwaukee Lutheran High School -
Basketball team win
In 1958, Knuth created a program to help his school's basketball team win their games. He assigned "values" to players in order to gauge their probability of getting points, a novel approach that Newsweek and CBS Evening News later reported on. -
Founding editors of the Engineering and Science Review
Knuth was one of the founding editors of the Engineering and Science Review, which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959. -
Switched from physics to mathematics
He then switched from physics to mathematics, and in 1960 he received his bachelor of science degree, simultaneously being given a master of science degree by a special award of the faculty who considered his work exceptionally outstanding. -
Mathematician Marshall Hall
In 1963, with mathematician Marshall Hall as his adviser,[3] he earned a PhD in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. -
He published the first volume
He accepted a commission to write a book on computer programming language compilers. While working on this project, Knuth decided that he could not adequately treat the topic without first developing a fundamental theory of computer programming, which became The Art of Computer Programming. He originally planned to publish this as a single book. As Knuth developed his outline for the book, he concluded that he required six volumes, and then seven, to thoroughly cover the subject. -
Knuth described computer science
In the 1970s, Knuth described computer science as "a totally new field with no real identity. And the standard of available publications was not that high. A lot of the papers coming out were quite simply wrong. ... So one of my motivations was to put straight a story that had been very badly told." -
After producing the third volume of his series
He expressed such frustration with the nascent state of the then newly developed electronic publishing tools (especially those that provided input to phototypesetters) that he took time out to work on typesetting and created the TeX and Metafont tools. -
The Art of Computer Programming
In his 1980 volume of The Art of Computer Programming , Knuth explains that he embraced his Chinese name because he wanted to be known by the growing numbers of computer programmers in China at the time. -
The Journal of Computer Science and Technology's header
In 1989, his Chinese name was placed atop the Journal of Computer Science and Technology's header, which Knuth says "makes me feel close to all Chinese people although I cannot speak your language". -
Health concerns
In 2006, Knuth was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent surgery in December that year and started "a little bit of radiation therapy... as a precaution but the prognosis looks pretty good", as he reported in his video autobiography -
The first three volumes and part one of volume four of his series had been published.
By 2013, the first three volumes and part one of volume four of his series had been published. Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science 2nd ed., which originated with an expansion of the mathematical preliminaries section of Volume 1 of TAoCP, has also been published.
