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.

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!

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: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.