

Knuth's 15th Annual Christmas Tree Lecture [video] - michael_dorfman
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/seminars/knuth/091208-knuth-500.asx

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pvg
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'.

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

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michael_dorfman
I'm looking forward to the summaries, but are you sure Knuth wants his videos
on YouTube? I'd ask, first. Right now they are available via iTunes and SCPD--
I imagine if he wanted them on YouTube, he would have had them put there....

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dangoldin
Knuth doesn't use email so the pkrumins will need to call him or send him
snail mail.

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jeresig
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!

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juvenn
You both are my heroes. One from academia, and another javascript guru.

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aw3c2
Can anyone find a working link to the actual video file? I tried
[http://proedvid.stanford.edu/knuth/091208/091208-knuth-500.w...](http://proedvid.stanford.edu/knuth/091208/091208-knuth-500.wmv)
with mplayer but it tries again and again without ever starting. Inside seem
to be more links. Curl has no luck either.

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ovi256
The .asx link works with Firefox or VLC, but not with Safari 4 on Snow
Leopard. I guess it's a codec problem.

Update : it stopped after a few mins ... server overload as others guessed.

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

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pavs
I might be one of the few who enjoyed it, didn't watch the whole thing yet.
Even though I have never watched his earlier talks to make a comparison, at 71
he might not be in his best form when giving talks.

