Knuth 3:16

This is Knuth 3:16

Welcome to Knuth 3:16, a commemoration of one of the great computer scientists of ancient times, Donald Ervin Knuth.

A rare surviving photograph of Don Knuth.
Coach Knuth Rockne
Knuth was probably born in the twentieth or early twentieth-first century. He had a primarily academic career, but unfortunately never held a position at any present-day institution, so many details have been lost. His achievements were many. Some sources credit him with being the original inventor of the computer, though this cannot be proved with any accuracy. Certainly he made significant advances in several areas of computer science and mathematics.

But his accomplishments spanned other fields as well. As we shall see, he was an artist of typeface and book design. He was also a leading moralist and wrote commentaries on God and the Bible. He was an enthusiastic musician, though exactly which was his instrument is a subject of some dispute (the most likely candidates are the accordion, jew's harp, and flugelhorn). And many historians agree that, before becoming a mathematician and computer scientist, he started life as a college football coach. He was evidently highly respected in this field and was widely known by his nickname "Knuth Rockne". In his declining years he returned to this nickname as his interest and talents went to the birds.

Here we celebrate Knuth using one of his own tricks: We examine the sixteenth sentence (zero-based, of course) of the third chapter of each of his surviving books.