Re:Knuth versus Email (1999)
by formerly_proven on Thursday August 27, 2020 @07:37AM
(#24292620)
> Changed by: Ursula N. Owen, 8-Mar-1999
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I was curious about this “Ursula N. Owen”, thinking perhaps she was an assistant of Knuth’s back in the 90s. It turns out that it’s a pseudonym sometimes used by Knuth himself, and is a reference to “U.N. Owen”, a character from And Then There Were None, a best-selling Agatha Christie novel first published in 1939 and one of the best-selling books of all time. The name “UN Owen” itself is a play on “unknown”, and I like to think of Donald chuckling to himself whenever he used that pseudonym.
From the postscript on https://ryanwaggoner.substack.com/p/could-you-delete-your-em...