Donald Ervin Knuth ( /kəˈnuːθ/ kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.

He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process he also popularized the asymptotic notation.