Donald Ervin Knuth is a mathematician and computer scientist well known for The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), which is a comprehensive monograph presenting algorithms and analysis based on firm mathematical and historical foundations.
According to Knuth introduced in an interview, there was no tradition in his family of higher education. He was purely fascinated by mathematics questions. When he was in secondary school, he won a competition for his classmates and school, by rearranging letters in "Ziegler's Giant Bar" and creating words as many as possible.
Knuth showed his talent in computer science at university. While studying for a degree in physics (changed to mathematics later) he got access to IBM 650, one of the latest computers at that time, he was attracted and tried to rewrite a better program for it after he read the computer's manual, which was also the first program he wrote.
Regarding to his education experience, Knuth always had an excellent academic record. he received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics simultaneously in 1960 because of his outstanding work, then got a PhD in 1963. At that time computer was still slow in processing complicated calculations so Knuth had an idea to do the defining work for this field.
Knuth tried to organize his handwritten pages to summarize the computer methods, he was suggested to expand his book to seven volumes. There is an episode when he finished volume 1 of TAOCP, he invented the TeX typesetting system in order to present the mathematical formulae in a nicer way in the 1970s, which is still widely used in the publishing industry.
Knuth has received many rewards and honours, including the A.M. Turing Award (1974), the National Medal of Science (1979), the Computer Language productivity award (1992), Katayanagi Prize(2010).
Since retirement Knuth has been communicating with the public through his webpage, his website addressed most questions the public is interested in and listed his annual lecture plan, also generously shared resources that he developed. It keeps updating regularly, which still retained the classic 90s style. Here you can click: 
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