Donald Knuth’s Christmas Lecture (2022) [video]

I've never met Professor Knuth, but he taught me a lesson that I treasure.

I suppose these days the best way I can describe it is that his example "de-weaponized" Christianity for me.

It could be said that religion is like a radioactive material; too much of it all together can go boom.

But Prof Knuth's lesson for me was that I didn't have to leave my mind at the door outside when entering a church. I found his book, "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About", a series of talks that he gave at an MIT Symposium.

And I don't, much. Talk about these things. And there's lots I don't like about church and the role we seem to press upon it.

But compassion and honesty seem to work pretty good. I'm grateful.

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

I attended this in person on Dec 7 (as I have every year it's been held, since 2014). A good text outline of the talk by David Cassel was just posted today, here: https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2022-christmas-tree-lec...

The most nostalgic part of this is that he's doing the presentation with a camera pointing at paper/books setup. Back in the 90's when I was talking CS, professors routinely presented by writing on plastic sheets using an overhead projector.

Not sure what I was expecting from Knuth though - maybe I was imagining some amazing TeX-based live diagramming environment, but then again he doesn't really use email which should have tempered these expectations.

Pragmatically, what are good use cases of a twintree data structure?

wow he's still around!

People get mad that George RR Martin can't get past his 5th book in a decade.

And here, Knuth has to spend like 40 years writing his 4th book (which has now expanded into 3 books unexpectedly: 4a, 4b and 4c).

/s

I joke of course. But TAOCP's future chapters are some of the most interesting computer challenges available. Every section Knuth writes is another treasure.

It's clear that the computer science field really did take off in the 70s and 80s, so it makes a lot of sense why Volume 4 has expanded so much and scope-creeped.