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.

Comments

TeX

[elgatozorbas]

Donald Knuth is legendary in the computer science world for writing a series of must-have reference books called The Art of Computer Programming. Part cookbook, part textbook, part encyclopedia, these books are also considered by many to be technical and personal works of art.

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.

Re:TeX

[Otik2]

Not only that, but he chose a great numbering scheme for TeX. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX :

TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches . The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become features.

So it's both useful and cool.

Re:Pretty good piece

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I think he came off as having OCD

[Rakshasa Taisab]

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.

Re:Abandoning Email is Stupid

[squiggleslash]

He actually abandoned email in 1990. The complaint was that email is for people who want to get on top of things, and he's the type of person who wants to get to the bottom of things.

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.

he didn't abandon email because of spam

[tuffy]

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."

Re:Pretty good piece

[bunratty]

You can still send him an email. His secretary prints it out on a laser printer, and Knuth stops by and picks it up and reads it. If it's worthy of a response, he writes on the paper with what looks to be a mechanical pencil and snail mails it back.

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!

Re:TeX more practical?

[IWK]

> TeX is already long in the tooth, and will
> 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 ...). 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).

So now my documents look superb and they are never eaten by my word processor. Tex has some life in it yet,,,,,

spoken word

[delirium of disorder]

Knuth's lectures are quite interesting. You can find some more of them here:

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"

Re:Book Revision

[wcrowe]

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.

Re:I'll tell you what's heroic

[theCoder]

If you have mplayer configured correctly, you can download it (no streaming required) under Linux:

mplayer -ao pcm -aofile npr4532247.wav 'rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net:80/real.n pr.na-central/me/20050314_me_06.rm'

oggenc -b 64 npr4532247.wav -o npr4532247.ogg

rm npr4532247.wav

Ignore any spaces in the rtsp link (slashcode inserts them to prevent page widening). The link itself comes from the smil file you get when you try to listen to the show on the NPR site.

I have a script that uses a similar method to grab the latest episode of Car Talk every week.

Re:Why do you like Knuth?

[egoriot]

I'm not overwhelmed by Knuth's contributions either. Two things come to mind that are probably important, though:

1. Knuth created the pushdown automata algorithm for LR Parsing. I'm not sure exactly what most modern compilers and parser generators are using, but I remember hearing that Yacc parses LALR(1) grammars, most likely using an algorithm based on his.
2. "Concrete Mathematics", a book Knuth coauthored with Patashnik and Graham, is a great book for reference and instruction in combinatorics. Things like generating functions, binomial coefficients, Stirling numbers, and finite calculus are probably not of intense interest to most computer scientists. As a graduate student in theory, though, I regularly deal with problems involving recurrences and series, and the techniques I learned from that book are invaluable.