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A Colorful Journey through Endless Patterns of Quick Wits |
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Home
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Masters
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Donald
E. Knuth |
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Donald Ervin Knuth
is a computer scientist, mathematician, and professor
emeritus at Stanford University (www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth). His work has
revolutionized the entire computer world, and his
famous multi-volume work The Art of Computer
Programming is the programmers’ Bible. Knuth created
the modern infrastructure of typefaces along with the
TeX system for computer typesetting and the METAFONT
system for creating and rendering fonts. Algorithms
and their analysis are his absolute domain, but Knuth
is equally strong in many other areas, like literature
and music, and puzzles are one of them.
Knuth's deep interest in puzzles of different kinds is
interwoven naturally and with elegance into his
computer scientific and mathematical work. The volumes
of The Art of Computer Programming describe and
discuss hundreds of puzzles (many of which are quite
hard) in connection with writing programs to solve
them efficiently by computer. In 2001 Knuth prepared
several very detailed indexes to works of the world's
most famous puzzle masters, Sam Loyd, Henry E.
Dudeney, and Professor Louis Hoffmann (Angelo John
Lewis). It is a precious resource for serious
puzzlers, where they can find the origin of many
famous puzzles.
One of Knuth's books, Selected
Papers on Fun and Games (2010), is fully devoted to
puzzles and similar topics. It is a must-have-and-read
for all puzzle lovers. In its 49 chapters, this
760-page volume comprises hundreds of Knuth's original
puzzle creations in different themes: articles in MAD
Magazine, numbers, music, geometry, road signs, word
play, knight's tours, car plates, games, and art, to
name a few. The book is richly illustrated and shows
amusing results not published elsewhere.
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To read the full article go to its
PDF version. |
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Last Updated:
March 6, 2018 |
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