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Donald Knuth On NPR
StratoFlyer writes "This morning, NPR is running an interview with Donald Knuth titled Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science. The persistence of this man is extraordinary, if not heroic. RealPlayer and MediaPlayer feeds will be available at 10am EST, according to the NPR.org site." Indeed they are.
Of much more practical importance to most: he is also the creator of TeX (from which LaTeX etc emerged). When he was dissatisfied with the way magazines printed his articles, he did what every other geek would have done, i.e. invented his own typesetting language. Et voilla.
The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.
He sure has: Knuth versus Email
hero ( P ) Pronunciation Key (hîr)
n. pl. heroes
1) In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.
Nope.
2) A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life: soldiers and nurses who were heroes in an unpopular war.
Nope.
3) A person noted for special achievement in a particular field: the heroes of medicine. See Synonyms at celebrity.
Yep.
4) The principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation.
Nope
See definition 3. If you're still confused, learn to read the dictionary. Maybe you were sick that day during grade school.
National Public Radio.
The fact of our society is that if you sent them to the funnny farm, you'd have very few people left who were good at math.
- These characters were randomly selected.
In other words, he was getting legitimate email, and it was a distraction for that reason.
I'm pretty sure that if the problem was spam, Knuth is one of the few people who'd actually create a system that can, actually, filter spam and spam only.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
From his website: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study."
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Looking at his response to my email I sent him in 1999, I'm suddenly stuck with a mystery. How did he get my address? I don't see it anywhere on the email I sent him!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
> TeX is already long in the tooth, and will
...). Instead of going to OpenOffice, which behaves in manners not unlike Word when confronted with big docs, I looked at plain text based markup languages. In the end I just went back to Tex (Latex). it's more readable than XML based markup languages (Docbook, anyone?), and has the best (superb) toolset while still having a large and vibrant user community (in academia).
> become obsolete soon
and join all those other technolgies which are "dead"? BSD, Lisp, Smalltalk, ???
When Word ate my latest report for the umptheenth time I decided to stop using it at the office (where its use is mandatory, but rank does allow some privileges
So now my documents look superb and they are never eaten by my word processor. Tex has some life in it yet,,,,,
Once in a while, I even pass the Turing-Test
OK, I know this is just a joke, but I can't let it be. I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics, so I've been around tons of people who are extremely good at math. There were some who had trouble getting along with other people, and some who did very well. Overall I don't know that the mix was all that different from any other group of people. As for "the funny farm"? In my 10 years of studying I think I may have run across 1 or 2 that it wouldn't surprise me to learn actually had serious mental problems. None so incapacitated that they couldn't function at some level--that's why they were in school and not institutionalized....
--b.
"Great minds" is more than an over-statement.
Knuth and Graham are both reasonably good at writing books, but awful at writing software - Knuth because TeX is one of the most poorly designed, difficult to use, impractical pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure of using; and Graham because he hasn't written any software since Viaweb, he now just writes about writing software.
Still, as you point out, I wouldn't hold my breath over ACPv4 or ARC - at this rate, Knuth will be dead, and Lisp will be mainstream before either product is released!
- Chris Z. Wintrowski -
[ Site ]
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_i d=421
or by searching the eDonkey/eMule network for "donald knuth" or "god and computers"
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Anyway, you can see that Knuth really hasn't given up email entirely -- he just does it by proxy so he's not constantly interrupted.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Weirdness and sickness is often only a question of degree. History is full of examples of geniuses that were barely balanced between the two, and in fact, their genius often derived from the sickness. Just because someone is functional doesn't mean they're normal and not sick. Sickness also doesn't mean that they have to be cured.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I love that he gives something like $2.56 or something to everyone who finds a flaw in the book.
It's a little jest. He awards $100,000,000 (in binary) to anyone who finds an error. In decimal that's $2.56.
Proverbs 21:19
I have a script that uses a similar method to grab the latest episode of Car Talk every week.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
I don't know what good this will possibly do, but here goes:
Case no. 2d01-529 in the District Court of Appeal of FL, 2nd District is what I'm referring to.
If you're too lazy to look this up, I'm sure you won't bother actually reading it, but here's an address anyway:
http://www.2dca.org/february2504.htm
Follow the link "2d01-529 / New World Comms. of Tampa, Inc. v Akre".
Well ... he qualifies for 1 as well. After all, he _is_ a living god.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Science and art, when properly done, both seek the same end goal: finding an elegant solution to a problem. If the problem is "how do I represent the beauty of the human form" the problem is deemed art. If the problem is "how do I find the similarities between two bit streams" the problem is deemed computer science. I'm thinking of an essay by Paul Graham:
"Taste for Makers"
This may be why Prof. Knuth's series is called "The Art of Computer Programming"
No. There's certainly an art to programming, whether it be formatting your code so it's readable and maintainable, or choosing the correct algorithm to use.
Great computer scientists are the ones who come up with elegant solutions to a problem, not just hack together something that works. That's art, not science.
Besides which, if math (the godfather of CS) is good enough to be considered an art, then I'm happy to hear others consider computer science an art as well.
Here is the interview in MP3:
http://www.cfconline.co.uk/knuth.mp3
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
Binary $1,000,000.00 would be decimal $64.00. I think what you are looking for is binary 100000000 cents = $2.56.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Here goes:
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
When Donald Knuth needs the power of a super computer, he has a resource that many others don't. Knuth can call up the folks at Google. They often let him tap into the same machines that search the entire Internet. Knuth is legendary in the computer science world for writing a series of reference books called "The Art Of Computer Programming." They're part cookbook, part textbook, part encyclopedia, and it's hard to escape the feeling that they are also works of art. For this week's look at the connections between science and art, NPR's David Kestenbaum visited Knuth at his house. He's in Palo Alto, California, working on Volume 4.
DAVID KESTENBAUM reporting:
"The Art Of Computer Programming" books are all about the most efficient way for a computer to get something done. The general notion is captured in Knuth's kitchen, though. He and his wife designed it using a branch of mathematics called graph theory to plan what should go next to what, the toaster, the fridge, the stove.
Mr. DONALD KNUTH ("The Art Of Computer Programming"): The most important thing in the kitchen was the wastebasket. Everything wanted to be next to the wastebasket. So now our kitchen has a centrally located wastebasket which you can easily toss things into from any direction.
(Soundbite of footsteps)
KESTENBAUM: Go up to the second floor, and on a shelf, you'll find multiple copies of "The Art Of Computer Programming" books, ones that translate into Russia, one in Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Spanish, German, Polish and Romanian. Inside the books are ideas that transcend language, the essential grammar for constructing fast, elegant computer programs. What's the quickest way to sort a list of names? You'll find hundreds of pages on that in Volume 3. Best way to divide two numbers? That's Volume 2.
(Soundbite of pages turning)
Mr. KNUTH: Page 235 to 240, and so here we have discussion of things that I learned in fourth grade, I think.
KESTENBAUM: Is that the most efficient way to do it?
Mr. KNUTH: Nope. No, but this would be the best way to do long division until you have numbers that are maybe a million digits, and then you start to use much more clever ways. You change the problem.
KESTENBAUM: Knuth's admirers describe him as a founding father of computer science. He pushed the idea that computer programs could be mathematically analyzed, refined and made perfect like poems, that there was a best way, an optimal algorithm, for every task. Volume one of "The Art Of Computer Programming" appeared back in 1968. Those were the days when computers were larger than cars. Knuth felt the embryonic field needed a central repository of knowledge and he sketched out grand plans for seven books, but now over three decades later, Knuth is just completing Volume 4. He's 67 years old and works on the project constantly. The field of computer science is expanding almost faster than he can write and compile.
(Soundbite of computer keyboard)
KESTENBAUM: Knuth is tall, thin, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. This morning's task is sorting things that will go into upcoming chapters. Knuth steers a book cart loaded with technical papers down the hall and into a kind of a home library which contains shelf after shelf of neatly organized folders. Knuth has managed to relate some unlikely topics to computer science. You can see that from the words scrawled on the folders.
Mr. KNUTH: Algebra, animation, Arabic language, asymptotics, axioms, bar coding. I've got about 15,000 items in these folders, and I'm going to have to boil this down into the final books.
KESTENBAUM: I'm reminded of Samuel Johnson in the 1700s compiling his dictionary of the English language. Knuth's books are personal, idiosyncratic and beautifully laid out. You will rarely find a word hyphenated at the end of a line. That's because he's spent 10 years developing w