Donald Knuth, The Man Who Made Algorithms Count

Donald Knuth is the reason computer science can say how expensive a program is rather than merely that it works. Before him the field had algorithms and it had intuitions about which ones were fast. He turned that into arithmetic, by counting operations exactly, and the habit he established is the single most useful tool for reading a quantum computing claim today. He is better known for other things, including a book he has been writing since 1962, a typesetting system he built because a publisher set his equations badly, a line about premature optimisation that almost everyone quotes wrongly, and cheques for $2.56. This guide covers all of it, and then makes the case that his method matters more to quantum computing than any of his individual results. Education BS and simultaneous MS, Case Institute of Technology, 1960. PhD in mathematics, Caltech, 1963 Key takeaways Knuth turned algorithms into a quantitative science. He established that you analyse an algorithm by counting its operations exactly rather than by describing it, and that discipline is now the basis of the whole field. The Art of Computer Programming has run for more than sixty years and is unfinished. Commissioned in 1962 as…