The hacker's story (serial eight) the God in the calculation

Writing the first book on the establishment of a loud reputation of the author of many, the life is mainly spent on a set of books of the author also many, but very few people because a set of books have not been finished to win the jackpot, but because a set of unfinished books to get the computer science and sciences the highest award of the Turing Award, there is only one. He is Gartner.

Gaunade

Nice programmer.

Gartner, the name of a Chinese computer scientist, was named Donnald Owen Knus, a Milwaukee born in Juviscamps state in early 1938. His family can only be regarded as ordinary, not a tangjiang, and not a saga. But decades later, he became a myth.

It is said that when children are still very young, the traits found in them can affect or even determine the direction of their life, as the Chinese saying goes, "three-year-old looking at the big, seven-year-old look at the old" seems to be a corroboration. When Donald was only a pupil, he would spend a few days rummaging through a large dictionary to try to exhaust the arrangement of certain letters. This has earned his Class A spelling competition organized by local confectionery companies, and this kind of perseverance has become an important footnote in his life.

In high school, Gartner once liked music and hoped to develop in this field. But after he enrolled at Case Science University, his passion for music was replaced by an IBM 650 computer. He seems to have a hunch on programming and arithmetic, and this intuition is laid out by a lot of math exercises. Soon, he became a good programmer and wrote a program for the school basketball team to calculate the value of each player. At the age of 22, he graduated from the case Tech University with a well-recognized school record, earning a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, and then entering the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a PhD in mathematics.

During his PhD, he began to write software for sale, many of which were compilers. The excellent quality of these software attracted the attention of the publishers, in 1962, a famous publishing house manuscripts to him, hoping to write some content about the compiler. Gartner has promised to come down.

Life after that seems calm. In 1963, Dr. Gartner graduated and left school to teach. class, scientific research, methodical. Until 1966, the publishing house editor really can't restrain, to ask the manuscript of the situation, just know that he has written 3000 pages, but even to the point. Under the balance, it had to be released as a series. In 1968, the first volume of "Computer Programming Art" (abbreviated as TAOCP) was formally published, and the second and third volumes were published in 1969 and 1973.

Courage and perseverance

In 1974, Gartner was awarded the Turing Award at the age of 36. The award was written to "honor its outstanding contribution in algorithmic analysis, programming language design and program design, especially its well-known" Computer Programming Art "series of books.

This bright-eyed result is a daunting achievement, so the response was intense and varied when Gartner announced that it would suspend the writing of the book. The reason for Gartner is that typography is too poor to affect the beauty of books, and some people think he's just a good-for-profit, and some think he's Genji greatly hyped. And Gartner is only using typical hacker thinking to solve the problem: since the tool is not called hand, then make a hand-calling tool.

But it took a lot longer than he planned. Ten years later, Gartner produced three revolutionary results: Typesetting software tex, font design software Metafont and "literary programming". Tex can perfectly achieve any choreography, Metafont can be programmed to design arbitrary fonts, while "literary programming" can be written in the program, while the formation of beautiful and informative documents. We can even clearly see the trajectory of these tools: the development of Tex because of the inconvenience of typesetting, the development of Metafont to make the typography more aesthetically pleasing, and the development of literary programming to make it easier to write the programs.

These three achievements, especially Tex, have changed the rules of book typesetting and quickly became the gold standard for scientific typography-and it is said, for Tex, to send Gartner another Turing award. Another manifestation of Gartner's perfectionism in these works is that Tex's version number is a decimal, constantly approaching the π value, while the Metafont version is approximate to the natural constant e. The stable version of Tex is now 3.1415926, while Metafont is 2.718281. Gartner was confident that the two software had no major changes, and that he even listed a reward to get the bonus from the $2.56 ("hex dollar"), which began to double every year.

After a tool called the hand, Gartner devoted himself to his life's career, and even for this masterpiece, he was in early glory in 1992. More than 10 years later, volume fourth began to be published-a volume that was so large that it had to be divided into good volumes, and that it had not yet been fully published. The third volume of writing is expected to be far from the future.

But Gartner is still working. TAOCP has been included in the list of "the most important 12 academic monographs of the 20th century", in parallel with Einstein's theory of relativity, Dirac's quantum mechanics, and Wiener's cybernetics. His goal is "to organize and summarize knowledge of known computer methods", others are not considered, even the countless people of the Turing Award trophy "Turing Bowl", for him, but also is a fruit-filled tableware.

The hacker's story (serial eight) the God in the calculation