
The Teacher - puredanger
http://marioaquino.blogspot.com/2011/09/teacher.html
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djb
I've had the opportunity to speak with Gerry on a couple occasions. He's an
incredibly nice and brilliant man. He pulled a postdoc into his office and
they talked to me for about an hour on a huge variety of topics. He taught me
the Y Combinator, gave me a pocket protector (same as the author's) and signed
my copy of SICP. (Hal, unfortunately, was on sabbatical at Google at the
time.)

What impressed me about Gerry was the incredibly wide variety of topics he
could speak on, not just computer science and electrical engineering but many
other hard sciences and I even remember him mentioning something about the
ambiguity of ancient Hebrew. He had something intelligent to say about
everything. A few other interesting points are that when he was my age (high
school) he used his knowledge of chemistry to make explosives for fun, and he
had a chair hanging from the ceiling he had built himself. Being around
someone that knowledgeable and intelligent has the potential to automatically
make you more ambitious, and it's something I recommend every young person do
as soon as possible. (PG said something similar about showing founders how to
be relentlessly resourceful: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508048>)

I came back and visited Gerry a few months later for a briefer visit. At the
time I was deciding between colleges. He asked me about where I was
considering and provided me the most helpful overview of the strengths and
weaknesses of each of their cultures. Needless to say, he was a pretty big fan
of MIT. ;)

He told me an interesting anecdote about Marvin Minsky that I haven't heard
anywhere else so I'll put it here. We were discussing good procrastination. He
said Minsky advised putting all mail in a pile, newest on top, and only
processing the pile top-down. Then, once a month throw out the bottom half of
the pile to save time. "Anything important will come twice," Minsky said.

~~~
cema
Great insight into the character, thanks!

    
    
      "Anything important will come twice," Minsky said.
    

Next time it may be _more_ important -- bills have a tendency to grow.

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ScottBurson
I was fortunate to have Gerry teaching my section of 6.031 (the predecessor of
6.001). I remember a story he liked to tell about why he thought Marvin Minsky
was very smart. Gerry was building some kind of connectionist system -- a
neural net or something, I don't recall exactly -- and mentioned to Marvin
that he was initializing the weights randomly "so it won't have any
preconceptions". Marvin replied, "Of course it will have preconceptions! You
just won't know what they are. "

~~~
Wilduck
This is an "AI Koan" that I've read before. I love all of these, and it's nice
to hear that there's some truth to (at least one of) them.
<http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/s/someaikoans.html>

~~~
gwern
If you looked at the Wikipedia article, you'd see a citation to Levy's
_Hackers_ for that AI koan :)

([https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AI_koans#Unca...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AI_koans#Uncarved_block)
is not the best Wikipedia article I've worked on, but in some respects, it's
one of the more special ones.)

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bodski
I've never been inspired to do programming from a video more than when
watching Sussman doing the HP SICP lectures with Hal Abelson. You can feel him
barely contain his enthusiasm for the subject. Truly infectious and all you
need to get a boost in order to plough into the next chapter of SICP :-)

I'd love to see Gerry Sussman's talk from Strangeloop this year, does anyone
know if a video is likely to be available at some point?

~~~
pashields
According to announcements made by Alex at the end of the conf, videos will
trickle out slowly but surely on infoq. He hoped the first would be available
in a few weeks.

It is definitely worth watching and I suspect worth re-watching many times.

~~~
puredanger
That is correct. I will try to make Gerry's one of the first to go up.

~~~
ghotli
Followed closely by simple made easy please? I've been describing rich's talk
as something I will probably carry with me the rest of my life. We talked for
5-6 hours about the concepts he posed after that keynote. I really want to
share it with others now that I'm back at the office.

~~~
puredanger
Those are both in the first batch.

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americandesi333
Its amazing to see what impacts a great educator can make on you... I have
never met Gerald, but can tell you that there are these gems of educators out
there that have single handedly impacted the lives of so many.

I will never forget how my economics professor at my small state college kept
a WSJ out for me every day so I could learn about the world outside of our
town in Missouri. Every week he would meet with me and would ask me what I
learned from it. At a college where 80% students were first generation college
students, it was him that really got a lot of people excited about the
world...

His name is Dr. Viran Kharadia

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xxcode
I was at MIT when Jerry taught adventures in symbolic programming. pretty
fucking awesome class. Also he offers you darjeeling tea if you go to his
office. very nice tea.

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mathattack
Sounds lime a gem of a person as well as professor. Thanks for sharing!

