There’s a substantial body of lore associated with Dennis Ritchie and his work. One of the minor stories involves his PhD or lack of it. The most common story is that Harvard refused to award Ritchie his degree because Ritchie objected to paying a thesis binding fee. I’ve always accepted that story but it never made sense to me. Having gone through the process and pain of writing a PhD thesis myself, I can’t imagine giving up the prize over a triviality. But, of course, Ritchie was unique in many ways.
That story—right or wrong—is the least of the mysteries around his thesis. A recent paper by Brailsford, Kernighan, and William A. Ritchie examines the mystery of how Ritchie “typeset” his thesis. The scare quotes on typeset are because this was in 1968 and the only realistic way producing hard copy for a thesis was with a typewriter. But the extant copies of the thesis, which was highly mathematical, has aspects which seem impossible to produce with a typewriter. It is in any event a tribute to Ritchie’s attention to detail.
Brailsford, of course, has a video about the mystery but to really understand what an astounding feat accomplishing the typesetting was, you need to read the paper. Note, especially, how Ritchie centered the Roman numerals on his lists. Brailsford and Kernighan are experts on this sort of thing and even they can’t figure it out.
William Ritchie is Dennis’s brother and has a website on the mysteries of his brother’s thesis. It’s also worth looking at.
To really understand what’s going on and why the physical presentation of the thesis is so astounding, you definitely should read the paper. It’s 10 pages but very interesting. The paper and the mysteries it examines tickles the intersection of several of my interests and I really enjoyed it. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, perhaps you will too.