Donald Knuth Turns Eighty

We've kept this blog going long enough that we start repeating our celebrations. Ten years ago Bill celebrated Don Knuth's 70th Birthday and today Donald Knuth turns 80. While he celebrates in Piteå, Sweden with its less than 4.5 hours of daylight, we wish him a happy birthday from stateside.

Looking back in this blog, in 2015 I wrote about the history of the history of computing including this wonderful talk by Knuth, Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science.

Donald Knuth is known for many things, important algorithms, the brilliant book series The Art of Computer Programming, TeX, the many awards he's won and the award named after him. In my favorite story, back in the 70's when Knuth started working on Volume 4 (still in progress), he wanted a good name for those hard problems that Cook and Karp found. His candidates "Herculean", "Formidable" and "Arduous" didn't get much traction so he ran a contest which had some interesting suggestions before reluctantly going with the name "NP-complete" that came out of a group from MIT.

In his SIGACT News article that described the contest, Donald Knuth was so sure that these hard problems would remain hard, he puts everything on the line, offering anyone who could prove P = NP a live turkey. May Don Knuth and his turkey continue to celebrate many more birthdays.