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

Favorite part

[daves]

He used graph theory to lay out his kitchen. The most connected resource? The trash can. It goes in the middle.

Book Revision

[MikeBiesanz]

Heard the interview on the way to work. I love that he gives something like $2.56 or something to everyone who finds a flaw in the book. He has cut checks for around 20K so far and that the first Book had 90% of it's pages altered in some way because of that. We have the same kind of thing where I work. Free 6pack to anyone finding a non-sensical phrase embedded in our documentation. Everyone actually peer reviews documentation now.

Re:Book Revision

[uhoreg]

And even though he may have cut checks for 20K, he's paid much less. Many people who have received checks from Knuth have them framed, and won't cash them in.

Re:Explain

[twoshortplanks]

Someone who accomplishes something important at great risk to his own life is a hero, not someone who plods along for years at a job no matter how important his contributions.

So what you're saying is, someone who is willing to (potentially) give up their life is heroic, but someone who is prepared to dedicate their life to a goal is not? That someone who gambles their life, knowing that they may or may not be successful and return to a 'normal' life is more heroic than someone who instead knowingly commits to spending the rest of their life, year after year, trying to achieve something?

Knuth was there first

[Animats]

Knuth was there first. When "Fundamental Algorithms" came out, there were almost no computer science books. There were vendor machine manuals, and books on programming languages. "A Fortran Primer", by Elliot Organick was about as good as it got. MIT students had a tech note series called HAKMEM, but few others saw those. There was a huge vacuum waiting to be filled. That's why "Fundamental Algorithms" got so much attention.

Re:I think he came off as having OCD

[hey!]

History is full of examples of geniuses that were barely balanced between the two,

Yeah, Isaac Newton for one. See Will Dunham's book "Journey through Genius" in which he describes a disgusting little experiment Sir Isaac performed with a pointed stick and his eyeball.

Just because someone is functional doesn't mean they're normal and not sick.

I'd say if a person is productive in society, and happy, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that he's sick. Even Sir Isaac. This sense that somebody who is a genius is necessarily a bit sick is an attractive myth -- it consoles the great body of us that aren't blessed with genius.

Re:TeX

[14erCleaner]

he is also the creator of TeX

My personal Knuth story: in 1979, when I was just starting graduate school at the University of Illinois, Knuth came on campus to give three lectures as that year's Gillies Lecture.

At the time, the second edition of Volume I had just come out, and everybody was eagerly awaiting volumes 4 through 7. The lectures were all packed, and the great man, inventor of LR parsing and author of the definitive tome on computer science, spoke on...

typesetting and fonts.

Don't get me wrong, the lectures were interesting, but it didn't seem all that fundamental to computer science, if you get my meaning. 25 years later, we're still waiting for volume 4 to be completed, but at least the new editions of 1-3 had nice fonts.

The following year, Douglas Hofstadter came to campus to speak. This was fairly soon after Godel, Escher, Bach came out, so we were all excited to see what cool and interesting CS things he would lecture on. His lecture turned to be on...

typesetting and fonts.

I guess it was just the thing to do at that time; little did I suspect that much of the productivity of US offices in the 90's would be spent selecting fonts for documents. I guess great thinkers are just ahead of their time.

Re:What I found interesting.

[WillAdams]

A classic experience relating to my perception of fundamentalism was w/ a friend's child who was finally taken to see her grandfather's workshop (he was a classic old-school cabinetmaker w/ the only power tool in his shop a band saw 'cause he couldn't find apprentices to do that sort of tedious thing who was said to ``make things by hand'').

The daughter on seeing the shop and the walls lined w/ neatly arranged saws, chisels, draw knives, planes, spokeshaves, clamps &c. shrieked, ``Mommy! You lied! Grandpa doesn't make things by hand! He uses tools!''

IME fundamental creationists exhibit a similar na{\"\i}vet\'e as to how God works.

William