Donald Knuth tells his life story exclusively to Peoples Archive

Peoples Archive presents a unique opportunity to watch the great Donald Knuth tell his life story and explain the influences and circumstances that led him to achieve his work but also what keeps him motivated.

Author of the legendary and on-going "The Art of Computer Programming", a must have on any programmer's bookshelf; Donald Knuth is a key figure of the computing world. Perhaps best known as the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, he is a renowned and respected Computer Scientist, whose work has won the respect of his colleagues. Recipient of the Medal of Science in 1979, among many others, he was also awarded the John von Neumann Medal in 1995 and the Kyoto Prize in 1996.

Donald Knuth has played such a pivotal role in his discipline and it is an honor to welcome his life story to the Peoples Archive Library. For more than 4 hours, he gives us an in-depth look at his life and work. Spending considerable time explaining the driving force behind the creation of the TeX typesetting system as well as opening up about what drives him to continue writing his now infamous books "The Art of Computer Programming".

Talking in-depth about the creation of TeX, from the initial trigger to the future of the system, he looks back on his decision to start working on it:

"My plan had been to go to Chile and spend a year working on Volume Four, my first real sabbatical, and I cancelled that to stay at Stanford and I stopped working on Volume Four, put that on hold starting in April of '77 and began to say, well, let me spend a year writing computer programs that will make my book look okay again.... let's say I finished that in 1985 and, and so finally, after eight years I was able to bring my typography project to a conclusion. It was supposed to be a one year project for my sabbatical year."

Some have also referred to Don Knuth as the father of the Analysis of Algorithms and explaining the reason behind his decision to embark in this particular field, he says:

"If I consider the entire class of all interesting algorithms then it's bound to be full of problems just as interesting as queuing and hashing for which I knew that they were there. So that's why right at that point I said mm, that wouldn't be bad for a life's, to spend a lifetime on it because you have a huge number of problems, not only do they have beautiful mathematical structures that tie together, you know, hang together in nice patterns, but also there are customers out there so that when you solve the problem the people say hey, thanks for solving the problem, Don. So it's a great field to embark in."

The Donald Knuth footage has been broken down into 97 stories, all titled and presented chronologically. They are accompanied by word accurate transcripts and additional resources including: a complete bibliography, biography as well as links to relevant websites.

Donald Knuth's life story is freely available to view on the Peoples Archive website and can also be purchased on DVD-ROM. Peoples Archive currently presents 39 life stories, totalling over 200 hours of video divided into 4677 segments. The Archive is grouped into seven sections: Arts, Literature, Masters, Medicine, Politics and Science. Future additions to the Archive include the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell and the physician Sir David Weatherall.



For further information, please contact: Geraldine Belloir, Marketing Manager, Peoples Archive Ltd. Tel +44(0) 20 7631 9922

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