Donald Knuth speaks about his life [video] | Hacker News Reader

Donald Knuth speaks about his life [video]

webofstories.com

184 pointsthedayisntgray16 comments

I hate watching videos, and the transcript as provided was just unreadable, so in 2010 I put the transcript on GitHub and started reformatting it: https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006

Pull requests welcome!

The transcript is very nice thank you for putting it together. You are right though, I hate the bold face. Luckily a quick trip to the developer tools took care of it. A better way to index large bodies of free form text is a topic index that points to the correct areas of the text for phrases and topics. These are sometimes known as concordances. That way the reader can decide what is important to them rather than letting you decide.

Thanks for the feedback!

Nice, but you should have written it in TeX :)

Thanks for the transcript!

I know I can submit a PR for this, but I feel the need to bring this up here since it was posted here for discussion.

In Chapter 2, 5th paragraph, these are the phrases you chose to bold:

> the high school I went to, again, was a Lutheran high school

> one of my teachers was a little bit prejudiced against blacks

You state earlier that the bolds are for the purpose of "pull(ing) out the main topics of each paragraph."

These two phrases you've chosen, if read together, totally misrepresent the point of the paragraph. Donald is making the point that he had a very positive experience in this Lutheran school and that it was "absolutely not the case" that "church schools are place where they teach intolerance" and that he had a "very good experience." Then he admits to one exception to his point and emphasizes that this exception was not worth paying any attention to.

I'm curious as to why you felt it was the right thing to focus on the one exception rather than the main point of this paragraph.

Thanks! Anyone know more about the following fascinating theorem? I'm guessing it's Cook's Theorem (I vaguely recollect from Ullman's Automata course), but I don't recall it the way Knuth puts it:

> Steve Cook had proved a very amazing theorem. He said that if you could, if you took a certain kind of computer that's very limited in its capability, and if you could write a program for that dumb kind of computer to solve a problem, no matter how slow that program was then there was a fast way to write a program for a real computer.

[92 - The Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm]

The KMP paper is "Fast Pattern Matching In Strings", which cites Cook's "Linear time simulation of deterministic two-way pushdown automata". The former has a neat history section that gives a little more detail than the interview.

Interesting, I am the opposite.

I would rather watch the video than read the transcript (although your formatted transcript was a lot better than the original).

I just enjoy watching smart people talk and explain things. I think you might lose something in a transcript vs watching the person say it themselves.

Particularly in this interview, his personality and sense of humour is evident watching it, and it might be lost just reading it.

It would be a lot better if they had posted the full video though, instead of editing it and splitting it up into small segments. Really disrupts the viewing process (especially on Chrome, where I keep needing to approve Flash to run).

Agreed. The video of him actually speaking has elements which are lost in a transcription. OTOH, if this were converted into a small book, it might be able to convey much of the same feeling.

Nice to see your post here. I've been repeatedly reading that transcript and sharing to my peers. Thank you

Maybe it's just genetics, but the thing about this video that I've never been able to get out of my head is how a smile is etched into Knuth's face. Even happy elderly folks usually have heavy, distinctive frown wrinkles, and you almost never see cheek wrinkles like these, let alone so pronounced. Maybe the way Knuth aged only indicates that he doesn't grimace when concentrating as most of us do, but I like to think a lifetime of smiling is responsible for the appearance. Whenever I get into the rut of thinking that life is a steady decline into loneliness and dissatisfaction, memories of this video remind me to be positive and playful.

I highly recommend the "Web of Stories" site in general -- many scientists and other people of note have given interviews about their lives and work there. As many of them are elderly, it is good that somebody gets them to do this before it is too late. Already we have people like Minsky and Mandelbrot that we can no longer ask about their lives but whose stories are archived on the site.

What a wonderful interview. It's very comforting to know that Knuth worked very very hard. It seemed like he had to overcome a lot of gaps in his knowledge (if that's the right way to put it) because of the environment he grew up in, yet he made the most out of the cards he was dealt.

Where most would give up, Knuth worked harder. What an inspiring man.

I like these two quotes of Knuth where he lets us know how hard he worked.

From this other small interview [1]:

"When I'm working on a research problem I generally begin by filling dozens of sheets of scratch paper with partial calculations. When I eventually get to a point where I can think about the problem while swimming, then I'm often ready to solve it."

From OP's interview [2]:

"So I went to Case, and the Dean of Case says to us, says, it’s a all men’s school, says, “Men, look at, look to the person on your left, and the person on your right. One of you isn’t going to be here next year; one of you is going to fail.” So I get to Case, and again I’m studying all the time, working really hard on my classes, and so for that I had to be kind of a machine.

I, the calculus book that I had, in high school we — in high school, as I said, our math program wasn’t much, and I had never heard of calculus until I got to college. But the calculus book that we had was great, and in the back of the book there were supplementary problems that weren’t, you know, that weren’t assigned by the teacher. The teacher would assign, so this was a famous calculus text by a man named George Thomas, and I mention it especially because it was one of the first books published by Addison-Wesley, and I loved this calculus book so much that later I chose Addison-Wesley to be the publisher of my own book.

But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve."

[1] http://authenticinquirymaths.blogspot.pt/2015/11/maths-in-sc...

[2] Transcript from here: https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006

I hope he offers a reward check for any inaccuracy in his interview.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

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