Editing Donald Knuth (section)

===Early work===
In 1963, after receiving his PhD, Knuth joined Caltech's faculty as an assistant professor.<ref name=vitae/>

While at Caltech and after the success of the Burroughs B205 ALGOL compiler, he became consultant to Burroughs Corporation, joining the Product Planning Department. At Caltech he was operating as a mathematician but at Burroughs as a programmer working with the people he considered to have written the best software at the time in the ALGOL compiler for the B220 computer (successor to the B205).{{r|Feigenbaum 2007|p=9}}

Knuth was offered a $100,000 contract to write compilers at Green Tree Corporation but turned it down making a decision not to optimize income and continued at Caltech and Burroughs.
He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship and Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship but they had the condition that you could not do anything else but study as a graduate student so he would not be able to continue as a consultant to Burroughs. He chose to turn down the fellowships and continued with Burroughs.{{r|Feigenbaum 2007|p=12}}
In summer 1962, he wrote a FORTRAN compiler for Univac, but considered that “I sold my soul to the devil” to write a FORTRAN compiler.{{r|Feigenbaum 2007|p=15}}

After graduating, Knuth returned to Burroughs in June 1961 but did not tell them he had graduated with a master's degree, rather than the expected bachelor's degree. Impressed by the ALGOL syntax chart, symbol table, recursive-descent approach and the separation of the scanning, parsing and emitting functions of the compiler Knuth suggested an extension to the symbol table that one symbol could stand for a string of symbols. This became the basis of the DEFINE in Burroughs ALGOL, which has since been adopted by other languages. However, some really disliked the idea and wanted DEFINE removed. The last person to think it was a terrible idea was [[Edsger W. Dijkstra|Edsger Dijkstra]] on a visit to Burroughs.{{r|Waychoff 1979|p=17}}

Knuth worked on simulation languages at Burroughs producing SOL ‘Simulation Oriented Language’, an improvement on the state-of-the-art, co-designed with J. McNeeley. He attended a conference in Norway in May, 1967 organised by the people who invented the Simula language. Knuth influenced Burroughs to use Simula.<ref name="Dahl 2001">{{cite web |last1=Dahl |first1=Ole-Johan |title=The Birth of Object Orientation: the Simula Languages |url= https://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/about/ole-johan-dahl/bibliography/the-birth-of-object-orientation-the-simula-languages.pdf}}</ref><ref name="Biography">{{cite web |title=Biography |url= https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/Biographical-Profiles/Knuth-Donald/}}</ref>
Knuth had a long association with Burroughs as a consultant from 1960 to 1968 until his move into more academic work at Stanford in 1969.<ref name="Nance">{{cite web |title=Interview with Richard Nance 2013 |url= https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/videos/donald-e-knuth-interviewed-by-richard-e-nance-knuth/}}</ref><ref name="Knuth CV">{{cite web |last1=Dahl |first1=Ole-Johan |title=The Birth of Object Orientation: the Simula Languages |url= https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html}}</ref>

In 1962, Knuth accepted a commission from Addison-Wesley to write a book on computer [[programming language]] [[compiler]]s. While working on this project, he decided that he could not adequately treat the topic without first developing a fundamental theory of computer programming, which became ''[[The Art of Computer Programming]]''. He originally planned to publish this as a single book, but as he developed his outline for the book, he concluded that he required six volumes, and then seven, to thoroughly cover the subject. He published the first volume in 1968.<ref name=TAOCP>{{Cite web |last=Knuth |first=Donald Ervin |title=The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) |url=https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190803223145/https://www.cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html |archive-date=2019-08-03 |date=2019-08-03 |access-date=2018-02-06 }}</ref>

Just before publishing the first volume of ''The Art of Computer Programming'', Knuth left Caltech to accept employment with the [[Institute for Defense Analyses#Center for Communications and Computing|Institute for Defense Analyses' Communications Research Division]],<ref name="Institute for Defense Analyses">{{cite web | title=Institute for Defense Analyses | website=INFORMS | date=2021-08-27 | url=https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/Non-Academic-Institutions/Institute-for-Defense-Analyses | access-date=2024-01-08}}</ref> then situated on the [[Princeton University|Princeton]] campus, which was performing mathematical research in [[cryptography]] to support the [[National Security Agency]].

In 1967, Knuth attended a [[Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics]] conference and someone asked what he did. At the time, computer science was partitioned into [[numerical analysis]], [[artificial intelligence]], and [[programming language theory|programming languages]]. Based on his study and ''The Art of Computer Programming'' book, Knuth decided the next time someone asked he would say, "Analysis of algorithms".<ref name="quanta_magazine">{{cite web |title=The Computer Scientist Who Can't Stop Telling Stories |url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416 |first=Susan |last=D'Agostino |work=[[Quanta Magazine]] |date=2020-04-16 |access-date=2020-04-19 }}</ref>

In 1969, Knuth left his position at Princeton to join the [[Stanford University]] faculty,<ref name="Computer Science department timeline">{{cite web | title=Timeline | website=Computer Science @ Stanford - Spotlight at Stanford | date=2019-06-21 | url=https://exhibits.stanford.edu/cs/about/timeline | access-date=2024-01-08}}</ref> where he became [[Fletcher R. Jones|Fletcher Jones]] Professor of Computer Science in 1977. He became Professor of The Art of Computer Programming in 1990, and has been emeritus since 1993.<ref name="homepage">{{Cite web |url=https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/ |title=Home page |last=Knuth |first=Donald Ervin |publisher=[[Stanford University]] |access-date=2005-03-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191127223728/https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/ |archive-date=2019-11-27 |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Donald Knuth |url=https://profiles.stanford.edu/donald-knuth |work=Profiles |publisher=Stanford University |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160612181314/https://profiles.stanford.edu/donald-knuth |archive-date=2016-06-12 |url-status=dead |access-date=2020-08-24 }}</ref>