The Essential Knuth (Paperback)

Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected! -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a mathematician, I was doing integrals or maybe was learning about Fermat's number theory, but I wasn't manipulating symbols the way I did when I was writing a compiler. With Chomsky, wow, I was actually doing mathematics and computer science simultaneously." How, when, and why did mathematics and computing converge for Knuth? To what extent did logic and Turing machines appear on his radar screen? The early years of convergence ended with the advent of Structured Programming in the late 1960s. How did that affect his later work on TeX? And what did "structure" come to mean to Knuth? Shedding light on where computer science stands today by investigating Knuth's past -- that's what this booklet is about.

唐納德·E·克努斯（Donald E. Knuth）在1950年代末過著兩種不同的生活。白天，他走在可見且受人尊敬的數學道路上。夜晚，他踏上了計算機編程和編譯器撰寫的未鋪設道路。這兩條道路交會了！克努斯在1961年度蜜月期間閱讀諾姆·喬姆斯基（Noam Chomsky）的《句法結構》一書時發現了這一點。他表示：“喬姆斯基的理論讓我著迷，因為它們既具有數學性，又可以用我的編程直覺理解。這非常奇妙，因為作為一個數學家，我通常在做積分，或者學習費馬的數論，但我並沒有像編寫編譯器時那樣操作符號。而在喬姆斯基的理論中，哇，我實際上同時在做數學和計算機科學。”克努斯是如何在何時以及為什麼將數學和計算機相結合的？邏輯和圖靈機在他的視野中佔據了多大的位置？在1960年代末結構化編程的出現結束了這一融合的早期階段。這對他後來在TeX上的工作有何影響？對克努斯來說，“結構”意味著什麼？通過研究克努斯的過去，揭示了計算機科學的現狀，這就是本小冊子的主題。