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Donald Knuth (b. 1938), American computing pioneer, is known for his greatly influential multi-volume work, 'The Art of Computer Programming', his novel 'Surreal Numbers', his invention of TeX and METAFONT electronic publishing tools and his quirky sense of humour. [Listener: Dikran Karagueuzian; date recorded: 2006]

TRANSCRIPT: I wasn't going to go into this whole project blindly, I wanted to… I wanted to, you know, avoid the mistake that almost every engineer makes when they… when they approach something with technology and that is to say, well, forget the past, it's all a new world. Throw… throw the old stuff out and we’re going to redo everything. So I didn't want to… in any way detach myself away from the old traditions. I had these ideas about using mathematics to capture the… the past, but I didn't… but I didn't want to throw away the past so I… so I did like lots and lots of reading in the library, and I… and I studied. And Stanford has one of the best collections of books on fine printing, called the Gunst Collection in its… in its department of… of rare books. And so I spent lots and lots of time looking at all the books I could get my hands on – on typography. Also, my wife and I are a member of the Associates of the Stanford Libraries [sic], and we went on a trip to Sacramento where we could see the Gutenberg Bible and various other typographic specimens. There was a show put on there at the Sacramento Bee office about history of typography and beautiful things, and we visited people who lived in the mountains and had their own printing presses and… and collected books on typography. So… so this was a 2-day trip into Gold Country, and we… and… and I'm staring at all of the letters that I see, and saying, how could I capture this in… in a computer? This was all taking place in the Spring of 1977.

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