He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.

He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.

[8] While a student at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, Knuth thought of ingenious ways to solve problems.

After reading the computer's manual, Knuth decided to rewrite the assembly and compiler code for the machine used in his school because he believed he could do it better.

[13] He assigned "values" to players in order to gauge their probability of scoring points, a novel approach that Newsweek and CBS Evening News later reported on.

[12] Knuth was one of the founding editors of the Case Institute's Engineering and Science Review, which won a national award as best technical magazine in 1959.

[4][12] At the end of his senior year at Case in 1960, Knuth proposed to Burroughs Corporation to write an ALGOL compiler for the B205 for $5,500.

[7]: 66 [16]: 7 In 1963, with mathematician Marshall Hall as his adviser,[2] he earned a PhD in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, with a thesis titled Finite Semifields and Projective Planes.

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).

[7]: 9 He 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.

[21][22] In 1962, Knuth accepted a commission from Addison-Wesley to write a book on computer programming language compilers.

[23] Just before publishing the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth left Caltech to accept employment with the Institute for Defense Analyses' Communications Research Division,[24] then situated on the Princeton campus, which was performing mathematical research in cryptography to support the National Security Agency.

At the time, computer science was partitioned into numerical analysis, artificial intelligence, and 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".

[25] In 1969, Knuth left his position at Princeton to join the Stanford University faculty,[26] where he became Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science in 1977.

This is where he had originally intended to write the seventh volume in his book series, which was to deal with programming languages.

In 1995, Knuth wrote the foreword to the book A=B by Marko Petkovšek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger.

[47] Around the same time, LaTeX, the now-widely adopted macro package based on TeX, was first developed by Leslie Lamport, who later published its first user manual in 1986.

[48] Donald Knuth married Nancy Jill Carter on 24 June 1961, while he was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.

[49] Knuth gives informal lectures a few times a year at Stanford University, which he calls "Computer Musings".

He was a visiting professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom until 2017 and an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College.

[52] In 2016 he completed a piece for organ, Fantasia Apocalyptica, which he calls a "translation of the Greek text of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine into music".

[55] Knuth used to pay a finder's fee of $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because "256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar", and $0.32 for "valuable suggestions".

"[3] Knuth published his first "scientific" article in a school magazine in 1957 under the title "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures".

He announced that, contrary to the expectations of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, nor Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone–Čech compactification.

)At the TUG 2010 Conference, Knuth announced a satirical XML-based successor to TeX, titled "iTeX" (pronounced [iː˨˩˦tɛks˧˥], spoken while ringing a bell), which would support features such as arbitrarily scaled irrational units, 3D printing, input from seismographs and heart monitors, animation, and stereophonic sound.

Also that year, he retired from regular research and teaching at Stanford University in order to finish The Art of Computer Programming.