Recent News
Recent News
News flash (January 1): Happy New Year to all! The beginning of YMM finds me still digging out my Stanford office, having just returned from an exciting three months at MIT. So it will be a while before I'm back in a steady state.
But please keep tuned for future announcements. While you're waiting, how about checking out my new book MMIXware published in December 1999?
News flash (March 17): I've just completed another new book that pleases me very much. It is called Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms and bound copies should be available before the end of May. My lecture at Stanford on May 30 (see below) will officially ``launch'' this book.
News flash (September 12): I just corrected some embarrassing errors in the floating-point rounding routines of the MMIX simulators --- in fact, I have to admit that they were even worse than the infamous Pentium bug. All MMIX users should please upgrade their systems to the latest version of MMIXware.
News flash (November 28): Hurray, my program for enumerating fixed polyominoes confirmed previous results of other researchers for up to 28 cells---results that had consumed nearly three years of computer time, distributed between dozens of computers in Europe---and also found t(29)=4820975409710116, t(30)=18946775782611174. All in less than 14 hours. If you're interested in cool stuff like this, come to my lecture on December 5 (see below), or borrow a copy of the video afterwards.
News flash (November 30): Boo hoo, I just learned that the results obtained two days had been scooped a zillion times over by Iwan Jensen of the University of Melbourne, who has in fact computed up to t(46)=68557762666345165410168738. (!!!!!) With the best methods I know today, that would have taken me more than $3^8$ times as long, and I'd also need that much more memory space. Well, I still am happy to learn of great new methods, and I still plan to give a fun lecture on December 5. Who knows, maybe I will have computed t(47) by then?
News flash (December 10): Grandson #3 born at 3:00am!
name = "Kevin Don Knuth"
type = "angelic"
weight = "3.6 kg"
height = "57 cm"
eyes = "brown"
hair = "red"
mother = "Julie Knuth"
father = "John Knuth"
everybody = "happy"
News flash (December 12): I just recomputed the polyomino counts obtained November30 by using Jensen's method; the whole computation now takes less than 4 minutes! So I am encouraged to shoot for t(47), although it's too early to tell whether I'll succeed.
Hip, hip, hooray, a long-cherished dream is now a reality: CWEB version 3.6 introduces new features for clickable hypertext links by which you can read programs with Acrobat. It also contains extensive revisions that greatly improve its support for C++. And version 3.61 (July 24) is even better! See my CWEB page for full details.
I strongly urge all CWEB users to upgrade to version 3.61 as soon as possible. Version 3.6 represented the first nontrivial change to that system in many years --- although I've decided not to call it version 4 --- and version 3.61 is identical to 3.6 except for changes to the Makefile and macro files. My present intention is that version 3.61 will also be the very last upgrade (except of course for fixes to catastrophic bugs). Therefore I have spent several weeks checking it carefully, with the expert help of Saroj Mahapatra and Andreas Scherer.
Addison-Wesley recently decided to put together a splendid boxed set of the five volumes on Computers & Typesetting that summarize the results of my work on TeX and METAFONT. This is the first update of Volume D for many years, and it also includes many recent changes to The TeXbook and The METAFONTbook and to Computer Modern Typefaces, thanks to improvements suggested by many thousands of volunteers all over the world. Nearly every page of these books has been changed since the first editions of 1986. So I urge everybody whose library has only the 1986 printings to ask their friendly librarian to obtain this new definitive set, and I also think everybody with more than a casual interest in digital typography will benefit from this upgraded set of books. The publishers and I have taken great care to dot all the i's and cross all the t's so that the books reach the highest standards of quality.
Furthermore, the publishers tell me that this boxed set will be available before Christmas! (Hint, hint.)
Although I must stay home most of the time and work on books that I've promised to complete, I do occasionally get into speaking mode. Here is a current schedule of events that have been planned for this year and early next year so far:
Jill's pictures of the events at Waterloo
Don Knuth's home page
