January 10, 1938: Donald Knuth born

You are reading this on a computer, so you owe a debt to Donald Knuth, who was born on January 10, 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Knuth is one of the giants of computer science, author of the ongoing project The Art of Computer Programming and several other books (including a novel about surreal numbers), creator of the TeX system for typesetting (which he invented in order to typeset TAOCP to his own exacting standards) and strong proponent of literate programming.

A noted perfectionist, Knuth offers small rewards to anyone who finds a typographical error or more substantive error in his books.

He’s also quite funny. He originated a course called Concrete Mathematics because it would be “hard, not soft”.