Overview

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's 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.
ISBN-13

9789491386039

ISBN-10

9491386034

Weight

0.34 Pounds

Dimensions

6.00 x 0.19 x 9.00 In

List Price

$15.00

Edition

1st Edition

Format

Paperback

Pages

94 pages

Publisher

Lonely Scholar

Published On

2013-08-01


View All Offers

Sort by:

Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
✨ Brand New
Seller details
Alibris
★★★★★

Sparks, NV, USA

Print on demand Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 94 p. Contains: Unspecified.
$16.20

 Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026

Used, Good
Seller details
Bonita
★★★★☆

Santa Clarita, CA, USA

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.
$43.88

 Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026


Bookstores.com relies on cookies to improve your experience.