Help Wanted

Dear people, this webpage is a help message unlike what you get by clicking `Help' in the menu bar: I am asking for your help, so that I can make my books as useful and complete as possible.

One way you can help is by reporting errors that I don't already know about. See the books page for pointers to the current errata lists of individual books.

Another way to help, if your native language isn't English, is to let me know the details of any translation of any of my books, when that translation is either said to be ‘in preparation’ (or not listed at all) on my webpage for that book. Sometimes I've had to wait years before learning about such translations. The process of translation is very difficult, and I wish to give as much credit as possible to the people who have performed such miracles.

And I need help proofreading the names of people who use “exotic” alphabets. If you can read Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and/or Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, or Tamil, etc., please take a look at my database of non-latin names below and tell me if any corrections are needed.

Do you know any of these people?

But I also have a much easier task, for which Internet users can be particularly helpful. I try to make the indexes to my books as complete as possible, or at least to give the illusion of completeness. Therefore I have adopted a policy of listing full names of everyone who is cited. For example, the index to Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming says “Hoare, Charles Antony Richard” and “Jordan, Marie Ennemond Camille” instead of just “Hoare, C. A. R.” and “Jordan, Camille.”

Here are some people whose full names I have been unable to discover. Such people often tend to be from Europe or Australia; some of them may no longer be alive. Perhaps you will recognize one or more of these names. With luck you might even be able to reach somebody on this list easily by email. I will gladly deposit 0x$1.00 (US$2.56) to the account of the first person who sends me the full name of anybody listed here. (See how to reply below.) Note: In many cases the person probably has only two names, but I'll want to see some convincing evidence of that.

How to reply

Send your comments either by email to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or by old-fashioned mail to

Donald E. Knuth
Computer Science Department
Gates Building 4B
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-9045 USA.

Although I'm working full time on Volume 4B these days, I will try to reply to all such messages within six months of receipt. (Please give me some indication of how you know the name, so that I'll be confident that you didn't simply make it up:-)


Non-Latin Names   

In the index pages of The Art of Computer Programming, I want henceforth to give authentic spellings of people's names in their “mother tongue,” as well as the latinized form that is conventionally used in Western books and journals. Therefore I have been preparing databases that contain such information for all the people that are currently cited in those books, as well as all people who I think will probably be cited some day as I continue to write new volumes and new editions. Of course these databases are currently incomplete, but I'm doing my best to make them as complete as possible as soon as possible.

I have never been very good at languages, but I would like to get the details right because I want to celebrate the fact that computer science is a fantastic worldwide enterprise. Therefore I'm hoping for assistance from people who have the knowledge that I lack. Please take a look at one or more of the compressed PostScript files below if you think you might be able to help with Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Gujarati, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Oriya, Persian, Russian, Sinhalese, Tamil, or Telugu names.

Please note that the “Western” form of a non-Western name is not intended to be a systematic transliteration of the original; it is rather the form actually used in Western publications. The two forms of a name are related but often independent, in the sense that neither one is necessarily implied by the other. (Sometimes I use a script that isn't really the “mother tongue”; for example, ancient Greece had no standard language, so I use the spelling adopted by scholars of classical Greek literature. Also, Leonhard Euler spent most of his life in St. Petersburg, and published hundreds of works there: so I give his name also in Cyrillic, both old style and new.)

If you spot any errors, please let me know. However, I've already received substantial feedback, so you shouldn't bother to report potential changes unless you are quite sure that the existing entry is erroneous (for example, if you are the person involved, or a close friend, or a bona fide expert).

The nice-looking Chinese characters in the list above come from CCT, an extension of TeX developed at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing. The Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic letters come from Omega, a 16-bit extension of TeX that is planned to encompass all of Unicode when it is complete.

If corrections are needed, please write to me at the address above. You might also know the correct way to write the names of other people (possibly yourself) who are not listed but who probably ought to be, sooner or later; if so, I'll be glad to add any new entries that are contributed. When making a correction or submitting a new name, please send me the Unicode numbers for all characters if you possibly can. (I've already listed Unicodes with all the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names.) Naturally I'm always happiest to cite the work of people whose name is already in my collection!

Don Knuth's home page

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