Donald Knuth making an Earthshaking Announcement June 30 in San Francisco

[halo]

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested the obvious: that The Art Of Computer Programming Vol. 4 - Combinatorial Algorithms is complete.

But that's no fun, so I hope it's something truly earth shattering, like Knuth getting an e-mail address.

[noonespecial]

However mundane it might actually end up being, I bet it doesn't trump the "announcement that will redefine how cities are built" turning out to be a goofy little scooter.

[lsb]

He had an email address. He gave it up in the early 90s, when he decided that 15 years of email was enough for any man.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

[imurray]

Given the venue, presumably the announcement will be TeX related.

[davidw]

LaTeX to be renamed iLaTeX, and Knuth will be creating a group to approve articles written in it, to make sure they don't tarnish its image in any way.

[eru]

Good joke.

Only--Knuth isn't the author of LaTeX.

[Sandman]

Nah, you're all wrong. It's actually this: http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg

[baddox]

I'm hoping he's discovered if P=NP.

[kloncks]

That will indue live up to the "earth shattering" promise.

I think it might be one of the few, if not the only thing, that would live up to that.

[philwelch]

Something tells me that if P = NP, they would have to be...delicate about announcing it, given the implications for cryptography.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that P = NP and the NSA is covering it up.

[elblanco]

That's exactly what I thought the moment I saw this. The other options are a working quantum computer or he's retiring.

[faragon]

Why not? In addition, he could demostrate that any given NP problem can be solved in O(N^2) time complexity.

[nopassrecover]

I doubt he'd wait until the TeX speaking role to announce that.

[Dellort]

That is obviously wrong as there's an N in there. CS professors will tell you the same.

[richcollins]

Dammit you beat me to it :-)

[unignorant]

Might it be sarcasm/parody? This can be conveyed with unnecessary capital lettering.

[jey]

Hyperbole, probably.

[Tichy]

A magical text with an unbelievable price.

[jey]

TeX's version number will converge to pi ahead of schedule?

[jmount]

I think announcement the Pi-version number of Tex is the right guess. From the Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX ) that is when Tex freezes and no more bug fixes are allowed (every behavior from that point on is a required backwards compatible feature).

[Avshalom]

Knuth has proven pi is not transcendental and is changing the versioning to use the Prouhet-Thue-Morse constant

[gloob]

More earthshaking: TeX's version number will never converge to pi?

[tokenadult]

Maybe he has a designated successor for TAOCP?

[pyre]

I would laugh if it was just something mundane, done in total Andy Kauffman style.

[die_sekte]

Maybe he is doing a pipe organ concert.

[asimjalis]

To connect this with the 29 other stories here, Literate Programming is also now no longer permitted on the App Store. Tangle and weave on the Android if you must.

[jsyedidia]

It's a funny comment, but not really true.

The ctangle program would just strip the comments (both C/C++ comments and TeX commentary) out of a .w file and re-arrange the C/C++ code to the order that the compiler would need to see it. While many other tools would leave tell-tale traces of machine-generated code, the C or C++ files generated by ctangle are really indistinguishable from human-written code, because they are the original human-written code. So Apple couldn't tell that you used Literate Programming, nor would it violate the spirit of the rules. Now I wonder how many people use Literate Programming to program for the iPhone. My guess is zero, which is too bad.

[Malic]

He's getting a job at Google?

[pibefision]

gmail product manager? :)

[rman666]

To announce he will be posing for a new "Programming, you're doing it wrong" poster.

[jey]

That's John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp.

[fdb]

He has solved the halting problem?

[jodrellblank]

He has halted the problem solving?

[samratjp]

He's going to write and direct a musical adapted from "The Art Of Computer Programming"

[sown]

Maybe it was hyperbole on his part?

[benofsky]

Quite possible!

[buro9]

It could be LaTeX v3... that's been in progress for so long that any major news would be a shock.

[dasht]

My guess (sure, I'll add to the noise): he's designating successors for the care, feeding, and future development of TeX. He's "retiring" from TeX. Hence the lead in to the panel session that follows.

But that's just a guess.

[devin]

Maybe he rewrote TAOCP in C?

[noamsml]

So it can be read with the iPhone?

[fbu]

He's geting a job at Apple and his books will only be able in the iTeX format ?