He was so offended by the ugly typography in his own book that he put his life's work on hold and invented an entirely new software system to fix the fonts, a system the scientific world still uses decades later. That is Donald Knuth in miniature: Turing Award winner, father of the analysis of algorithms, and a man constitutionally incapable of accepting "good enough."

This episode follows the eighth grader who faked a stomachache to brute-force a candy-bar word contest with an unabridged dictionary, the 1958 college student whose basketball analytics program made the CBS Evening News, and the consultant whose single programming manual ballooned into the 60-year, seven-volume Art of Computer Programming. It covers Big O notation, the TeX typesetting detour, the famous hexadecimal bug-bounty checks, and the pipe organ in his living room.