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Donald Knuth’s first published work was published in Mad Magazine - https://silezukuk.tumblr.com/post/616657913

He lists it as his first published paper: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.pdf

So the arguably most reknown computer scientist of all time got his start in Mad Magazine.




Here's a fun fact: There's a typo in his article [0].

I only learned about the typo when I asked him to sign my copy at a Christmas Tree lecture years ago. Instead of signing it, he corrected the typo. He had a mnemonic he used to remember the digits in a Potrzebie. He had the mnemonic stored on a file on his home machine. I watched him ssh to the machine, then fire up Emacs to look up the mnemonic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie


Wasn't "gzorp" a Mad-ism too ? And no doubt forgetting many others...


That could be Don Martin - he was the sound effects king. sklork




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