> "These account balances reflect only the rewards for errors reported since the beginning of 2006. Many reward checks were issued during 1968--2005, too numerous to mention here."
There's 20 years on that chart vs 37 not on it.
Also that's "account balance" rather than "the most Reward checks" which I take to mean "the most [number of] reward checks" -- there's probably a correlation, yes, but [0] shows a variety of ways where check values are non-constant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check#Reward_amou...
Udo's knowledge of TeX is absolutely stunning, so I would be very surprised if he weren't in first place. And DRF [0] [1] seemed to agree with the ranking in a sibling comment [2], which is also suggests that it's accurate.
> There's 20 years on that chart vs 37 not on it.
The reward values have increased exponentially over the years (I think?), so the older years should be relatively insignificant to the overall balances.
[0]: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/618-an-interview-with-david-fu...
You probably have a substantial subset of the people on that list on HN, so it might be possible to recover a chunk of the 'paper era'.
For the record I cashed both and have zero regrets. At the time it definitely felt like the right thing to do as I am not into collecting tokens.
I'm not doubting the authority on the balances; it's the correlation to the number of checks I'm querying - high balance doesn't necessarily mean high number of checks, especially since the checks can have different values.
My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.