Donald Knuth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Donald Knuth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Awards

* First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1971
* Turing Award, 1974
* National Medal of Science, 1979



* John von Neumann Medal, 1995
* Harvey Prize from the Technion, 1995[9]
* Kyoto Prize, 1996

[edit] Knuth’s humor

Knuth is known for his 'professional humor'.
One of Knuth’s reward checks

* He used to pay a finder’s fee of $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because “256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar”, and $.32 for “valuable suggestions”. (His bounty for errata in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, is, however, $3.16). According to an article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review, these Knuth reward checks are “among computerdom’s most prized trophies”. Knuth had to stop sending such checks in 2008 due to bank fraud, and instead now gives each error finder a publicly listed balance in his fictitious 'Bank of San Serriffe'.[10][11]
* Version numbers of his TeX software approach the transcendental number π, in that versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14. 3.141, and so on. Version numbers of Metafont approach the important number e similarly.
* He once warned a correspondent, “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”[1]"