Today's guest is the much-acclaimed computer scientist and mathematician Donald Knuth.

Now, I don't even know where to start with a short biography of him.

Widely regarded as the godfather of computer science, his multi-volume, the art of computer programming, well, is kind of a big deal.

He's won more prestigious awards than I've even heard of.

But for many, his greatest blessing to the world is devising the omnipresent tech type-setting

format, which is transformed the way mathematics is communicated.

We'll talk about all that and plenty more in

today's episode. But as is often the case, I found myself starting with the issue of name

pronunciation. My name. Your surname. That K looks like it should be silent. Well, I have some second cousins who go by Nuth.

But I figure you got only five letters in the name.

You might as well use them all.

Also, people say cunt, I'm sorry to say.

You know, they have dyslexia.

And maybe in that case it would have been better if it was a silent K, I don't know.

But, yeah, I imagine you get to hear your name pronounced a bunch of different ways, too.

I do, I do.

But Knooth is like, well, always what's how your father pronounced it.

Exactly, and his father.

I'd like to claim descent from King Canute.

King Canute is buried in Winchester and, you know, famous as one of the first Danish kings.

And I got friendly with the Count Canuth in Copenhagen, who's quite famous as being the man who knows the most about the part of the world that's

under the cap at the top of the, you have a globe and at the North Pole, there's a metal cap.

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