Don Knuth's home page
If your name is on the list below, I've either got a letter for you that was returned by the Post Office for lack of a decent address, or a message for you that couldn't be sent because your email address went stale, or a snail-mail letter for you that can't be sent because I don't know where to send it; please read on! If not, please ignore this page.
During the summer of 1981, my work on TeX began to consume so much time that I had to stop answering mail about The Art of Computer Programming. I began to set all such incoming mail aside and to send form-letter replies: ``Thanks, I'll get back to you soon.''
Finally I was able to go through all the letters accumulated during a 15-year hiatus, in order to correct all errors that were reported to me. (You can see the results in the latest TAOCP errata.) And on 1 July 1996 I sent out more than 250 letters, 125 of which contained checks to reward the first finder of each error. (I may not be quick, but at least I keep my promises...)
Of course, many people had moved since they wrote to me in the early 80s. My secretary and I tried to get current addresses when we could; but many of the letters were returned, marked ADDRESS UNKNOWN. I've decided to keep those letters until I can locate their recipients, hopefully with the help of Internet correspondents.
Also in the new millennium we get bug reports to which we cannot respond because the sender's address doesn't work a month later. This is progress? In some recent cases, I not only have a check to send out, but also a T-shirt. Surely you don't want to miss that!
Furthermore, due to a very unfortunate glitch, the reward checks that I wrote in 2002 to the people who had found bugs in TeX-related software or documentation were not forwarded by the person who had promised to do so. I wrote new checks in March 2006, but several of the recipients have no known snailmail address.
Here's a list of the ``dead letters'' that are currently sitting on my desk unclaimed. Please send a note to taocp@cs.stanford.edu if you know the correct mailing address of any of these people (for example, if you are one of them):
Don Knuth's home page