MAA

Donald Knuth wins Kyoto Prize

Donald Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University, was one of three winners of the 1996 Kyoto Prizes for lifetime achievement inthe arts and sciences. The prizes are awarded by the Inawori Foundation, and include a cash award of 50 million yen. This year's other winners were Mario Capecchi, a human geneticist at the University of Utah, and Willard Van Orman Quine, a logician and philosopher at Harvard.

Donald Knuth has made numerous contributions to mathematics and to computer science. In computer science he has been enormously influential, ranging from his advocacy of "literate programming" to his series of books on The Art of Computer Programming. The foundations said that "His enormous contributions ... have established him as a giant in the field." Knuth has also written mathematics books, ranging from Surreal Numbers, an exposition of Conway's theory of numbers and games (written in the form of a play), to Concrete Mathematics (written with Ron Graham and Oren Patashnik). People who love good typesetting and beautiful books, especially those who need to typeset mathematics, know Knuth as the author of the TeX typesetting system which has become the standard in many fields.


MAA Online is edited by Fernando Q. Gouvêa
Last modified: Tue Nov 12 09:48:00 1996