Better handling of person names in index

Question

I am writing a book that mentions many people. Say that I mention Donald Knuth on a page. I would have:

... Donald Knuth\index{Knuth, Donald}

In many other places I have mentioned Donald Knuth. Right now it seems that I need to manually add the \index everywhere I mention Dr. Knuth. Is there a way that I can just declare Knuth as an indexed term and have this done automatically?

This is different than the question discussed in Auto generate an Index.

And, alas, the 29-line program https://github.com/themoodymann/IndexTex is over-aggressive about indexing. It also does not remove \index{} entries that have been inserted when the text changes.

I would like to do the following:

1. Define all of the names that I care about.
2. Have LaTeX automatically index the names when they are encountered.
3. Have the option of automatically italicizing the name on first reference.
4. Have the option of automatically adding birth and possibly death dates on first reference.

Answer 1

Define a macro for each name of interest, for example

\newcommand{\dknuth}{Donald Knuth\index{Knuth, Donald}}
\newcommand{llamport}{Leslie Lamport\index{Lamport, Leslie}}

and use it wherever you want to print the name.