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.

I'll tell you what's heroic

[Weaselmancer (533834)]

Posting Realplayer feeds on Slashdot's main page. If they're available for more than 5 minutes, then that's heroic.

Re:I'll tell you what's heroic

[Taladar (717494)]

Being in Real Player format they were unavailable to most of us even before they got posted on /. so there is no harm done.

Re:I'll tell you what's heroic

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

A Microsoft product, and a comparable non-Microsoft product are referenced in the article. The non-Microsoft product gets slammed first. I can't think of a better demonstration of the crappy corporate practices of Real.

Pretty good piece

[Concern (819622)]

Knuth came across as charming, and funny, and classically geeky, re-computing the size of a piece of paper necessary for making a five-pointed star with one cut and rattling off the equation behind it, or describing his mental process behind brushing his teeth, but also clearly grounded in continuing scholarly work.

The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.

Re:Pretty good piece

[by Anonymous Coward]

The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.

He sure has: Knuth versus Email [stanford.edu]

Re: Getting Rid of E-mail

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

If someone sends me a snail mail letter, the quality tends to be much higher than e-mail. Electronic media tends to make things so easy that folks don't put much forethought into their writings? Want proof? Look at my comment history :)

Re:Pretty good piece

[bunratty (545641)]

You can still send him an email. His secretary prints it out on a laser printer, and Knuth stops by and picks it up and reads it. If it's worthy of a response, he writes on the paper with what looks to be a mechanical pencil and snail mails it back.

Looking at his response to my email I sent him in 1999, I'm suddenly stuck with a mystery. How did he get my address? I don't see it anywhere on the email I sent him!

Re:I think he came off as having OCD

[hey! (33014)]

Well, let's hope you never apply for a job doing triage at a psychiatric hospital.

There's a world of difference between amusing yourself with puzzles and being obsessive. When you are obsessive, you can't stop yourself from thinking something even when it distresses or harms you.

Being enormously smarter and more creative than the average person is a form of weirdness, but not a form of sickness.

Re:I think he came off as having OCD

[Rakshasa Taisab (244699)]

The fact of our society is that if you sent them to the funnny farm, you'd have very few people left who were good at math.

Re:I think he came off as having OCD

[squiggleslash (241428)]

The other way of looking at this is that being good at mathematics is a mental illness. I'm having difficulty understanding why you and the grandparent are considering Knuth's perfectionalism a bad thing. Is he anti-social as a result? Does his perfectionism prevent him from leading a safe, furfilling, life?

I see no evidence that it's doing any such thing. He's a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist, and that's all. The world is full of different people. It's also full of arrogant, scared, jerks who do not like differences.

TeX

[elgatozorbas (783538)]

Donald Knuth is legendary in the computer science world for writing a series of must-have reference books called The Art of Computer Programming. Part cookbook, part textbook, part encyclopedia, these books are also considered by many to be technical and personal works of art.

Of much more practical importance to most: he is also the creator of TeX (from which LaTeX etc emerged). When he was dissatisfied with the way magazines printed his articles, he did what every other geek would have done, i.e. invented his own typesetting language. Et voilla.

Re:TeX

[Otik2 (317009)]

Not only that, but he chose a great numbering scheme for TeX. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX :

TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches . The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become features.

So it's both useful and cool.

Re:TeX

[by Anonymous Coward]

When he was dissatisfied with the way magazines printed his articles, he did what every other geek would have done, i.e. invented his own typesetting language.

You mean he didn't piss and moan about it on Slashdot?

Favorite part

[daves (23318)]

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

Re:Favorite part

[Otter (3800)]

A dog would probably be more aesthetically pleasing and environmentally sound, and has the further advantage that it will gladly walk to wherever the food is being discarded.

A goat will address a wider range of garbage, but has head-butting-related disadvantages.

Re:Favorite part

[Lars T. (470328)]

A dog right in the middle of the kitchen table? I'm not so sure about that.

Re:Favorite part

[jdgeorge (18767)]

This is a great idea. Sometimes I imagine my ideal house, and the kitchen table would have a garbage receptacle right in the middle.

In my house, the garbage receptacles are seated around the perimeter of the kitchen table.

Book Revision

[MikeBiesanz (867611)]

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 (583723)]

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.

Dyslexic editor gets it all wrong

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's actually Donald Knuth on RPN. And he says it?s the greatest cause of brain damage in computing.

Knuth was there first

[Animats (122034)]

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:Donald Knuth on NPR?

[worst_name_ever (633374)]

Is NPR some kind of drug?

Judging by the strung-out feeling this news junkie gets during the accursed pledge drive week, I'd say yes it is.

Re:Explain

[twoshortplanks (124523)]

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?

Re:Explain

[kin_korn_karn (466864)]

perhaps Mr. Knuth is a sandwich made on a long bun.

Re:Open Source editing

[k98sven (324383)]

They also mention it in the TFA.

But I hate how you refer to this as 'open source'. Can you change Knuth's books any way you want and redistribute them? Nope. So really, it is nothing like open source or free software, except for inviting collaboration.

And collaboration did exist long before OSS. Academic peer-review has been around for a hundred years. And collaboration has always been popular in the academic world. It was uses within academic collaboration which turned ARPANET into the internet. It was the collaborative ideals of the academic world which inspired RMS to create free software.

So, IMHO, calling this 'open source editing' or talking about 'open source science' is really putting the cart in front of the horse.
(Not that academia hasn't been influenced by OSS/Free software, but since OSS/Free Software also originated there, that's what you call feedback, not a new and direct influence.)