Communications of the ACM
CS Pioneer Knuth Releases Long-Awaited Textbook
The most recent volume of Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" series was published 38 years after the previous volume.
Credit: Marcelo Toledo
Computer science pioneer Donald Knuth has released the "The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A, The Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1," the first part of volume four of his seminal "Art of Computer Programming" book series.
"Knuth's 'Art of Computing Programming' played a definite formative role in transforming the field of computing from its infancy stage into a respected discipline," says University of Maryland professor Uzi Vishkin. Combinatorial algorithms deal with finding patterns in huge data sets. A powerful new algorithm can solve seemingly intractable combinatorial problems, according to Knuth. "The art of writing such programs is especially important and appealing because a single good idea can save years or even centuries of computer time," he writes.
Knuth has taken decades to complete the work. He publishing the first volume of the "Art of Computer Programming" in 1965, and Volume 3 was published in 1973. He expects to finish Volume 5, on syntactic algorithms, by 2020.
From PC World
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