A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder Page B

house that he and his wife had helped to design—he’d had a pipe organ installed in one of its rooms; he was a fine amateur musician. He spent long hours in his home office, creating drafts of Volume 4B of his gigantic book. That volume alone had grown, in concert with the rapidly expanding field it explored, to three lengthy volumes of its own, only one of which was finished. As he explained on the Stanford webpage, the work he faced was the kind that requires “long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
    It wasn’t as if Knuth forswore communication with the world. He just wanted to do it on his own terms. Though he no longer taught regular classes at Stanford, he still gave half a dozen lectures a year. He played the pipe organ at his church (Lutheran), and, at least in the past, he had led a Bible study class. Over the years, his work had obliged him to confer with thousands of colleagues, and he welcomed readers who identified errors or made “significant suggestions.”
    Knuth had received more than a hundred honors and awards, including the most prestigious available to computer scientists. These came mainly because of the first three volumes of
The Art of Computer Programming.
Those 2,200 pages had brought the rigor of analysis and mathematical proof to computer algorithms. More broadly, they had refined, assembled, and organized much of the best of what had been known and thought in computing, both the work of others and Knuth’s own discoveries. In the words of one admiring colleague, Knuth’s unfinished multivolume work had “established computer programming as computer science.”
    The title of the book amounted to an assertion. In one of his essays, Knuth examines the meanings of “art” over time, and he concludes: “We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty.” He asserts: “Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write
grand
programs,
noble
programs, truly magnificent ones!” In a book called
Literate Programming,
he sets out to show how programs can be explicated by their makers, not just to clarify their aims and methods but to turn them into works of art. “Programmers who subconsciously view themselves as artists will enjoy what they do and do it better,” he writes.
    He had created many programs of his own. The largest and best known is called T E X (the name is derived from Greek and pronounced “tech”), a suite of software for computerized typesetting that includes a program for creating fonts. It was the first system that enabled computers to control the layout of text typographically and to print with the quality of hot-metal typesetting. Unlike many of the typesetting systems that followed, it adroitly handled mathematical and scientific notation. It was accounted a marvel when it first appeared, and more than thirty years later, both the original and variations of the system were still in use. Knuth never patented or licensed it; he had made the source code free and available to all.
    His first publication was a spoof, “The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures,” published in
Mad
magazine in 1957, when he was nineteen. He had been a prolific and versatile writer ever since. His
Collected Papers
alone now filled eight volumes. He had written books about mathematics and the Bible, also a collection of lectures and essays aimed at a general audience. In one of these, “God and Computer Science,” he writes: “I think it’s fair to say that many of today’s large computer programs rank among the most complex intellectual achievements of all time. They’re absolutely trivial by comparison with any of the works of God, but they’re still somehow closer to those works than anything else we know.” The point is unusual. Many have professed to