Knuth's 15th Annual Christmas Tree Lecture [video]

Keep in mind these are fairly dense (judging from the ones I've attended in years past) and assume a reasonable amount of background - they're not google tech talks. 'Christmas Lecture' makes them sound universally accessible but that's not quite the case. It's helpful if you're familiar with the sort of topics covered in his Concrete Mathematics. Also if you're expecting a lecturer in the Feynmanian stratosphere, you might be disappointed. Certainly interesting stuff, with those caveats.

Edit: A few minutes into this lecture after drawing a graph and its Laplacian matrix on a bit of paper he says 'I'm not going to use high-powered determinant theory in this talk but if determinants scare you, too bad, just enjoy the jokes'.

I'll download all his lectures, convert to a good format, re-upload to youtube, and then write summaries of all of them!

Excellent! I attended this talk in person and it was great to see him work. (I'm the "the guy from Boston" that Knuth referred to.) Picture with Knuth: http://twitpic.com/sqxku

My note-taking pages were absolutely loaded by the end of the talk. I'm glad I got to hear from him at least once in my life!

Can anyone find a working link to the actual video file? I tried http://proedvid.stanford.edu/knuth/091208/091208-knuth-500.w... with mplayer but it tries again and again without ever starting. Inside seem to be more links. Curl has no luck either.

He is maybe one of the greatest computer scientists of all time, but he doesn't seem to be very good talker. Kinda surprising.