Donald E. Knuth: An Oral History (2018) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Donald E. Knuth: An Oral History (2018) [video]

purl.stanford.edu

173 pointsbsilvereagle20 comments

Speaking about Knuth audiofiles, I recently created a RSS feed for the Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" audio files (https://j11g.com/knuth.xml). This way you can listen to it in your favorite podcast player. For example, I added the feed to Overcast: https://overcast.fm/p1120847-YM0aS7

Thank you!I look forward to listening.

To those of you who use the default podcasts app on iPhone: 1. Go to the library tab 2. Tap the edit button 3. Select "Add a Podcast by URL..." 4. Paste the xml link above

Thanks, very convenient! I assume there's no video of these lectures? I've listened up to the 3rd lecture and it seems that one and especially the fourth one (artwork) would benefit from video.

This is in fact one of several oral histories that Knuth has done over the last few years:

* 2001, 2 hours audio (http://purl.umn.edu/96227), 27-page transcript (https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107413) (partial I guess?)

* 2006, Web of Stories, 7.5 hours video in 97 short parts https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1Jq... , transcript (https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006)

* 2007, interview by Ed Feigenbaum, 3 hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp7GAKLSGnI) + 4 hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqPPll3uDa0), 73-page transcript (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...)

* 2018, this one (https://purl.stanford.edu/jq248bz8097), about 4.5 hours, 177-page transcript (but 50 pages of those are Knuth's CV!)

* 2018, by the Computer History Museum, 1.5 hours, specifically about the earliest programs he wrote as an undergrad when he first encountered computers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9JOrmgHw28): the programs themselves are here: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=X8738.... (in machine language / assembly)

I've watched the Web of Stories one fully (and the others not yet fully)… they are a delight. You can see the way his mind works, and he's someone whose career has spanned basically the entirety of computer science as a separate academic discipline.

Transcript: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:jq248bz8097/jq248bz80...

Gulp. 177 pages. A book.

You expected anything less from Knuth?

It’s a wonder it didn’t take a decade or two to come out!

One day out of sheer boredom I was checking who is the youngest turing award winner. And it turns out Knuth is the youngest, having won the award at 36 years of age.

I'm hoping he releases his books under CC, or into the public domain. On that note, are there excerpts or small parts of TAOCP available anywhere online for free?

Everything Knuth has written for TAOCP after Volume 3 (over the last dozen years or so), amounting to all of Volume 4A (published as a ~900-page book) and about two-thirds of Volume 4B (yet to be published), is basically available online in draft form (very close to the final published version though of course Knuth being Knuth there may be many very minor changes), from his website, or more conveniently collected here: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/

By the way, Knuth's monumental volume on searching is in need of an update since we've entered the age of search engines.

The second edition came out in 1998. Parallel merge sort well predates that, Parallel merge sort, Richard Cole, SIAM Journal of Computing, 1988.

PageRank is more of comparison function for determining order rather than a sort algorithm in and of itself.