
Donald Knuth's 23rd Annual Christmas Lecture: A Conjecture That Had to Be True - svat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxQw4CdxLr8
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I attended this yesterday. Knuth started with a problem about rectangles
inside rectangles ([https://imgur.com/faWRt2q](https://imgur.com/faWRt2q) —
it's going to be an exercise in 7.2.2.1 of TAOCP when that's published,
currently in the draft version of Pre-Fascicle 5C). He worked through some
small cases, made a conjecture, showed a problem submitted to the Monthly, and
lots of cool stuff with generating functions. The lecture was also peppered
with jokes and cool stories, including a fascinating conjecture by Bill
Gosper, who has a long history of coming up with these Ramanujan-like
identities. He also showed a wonderful conjecture (involving queens on an
infinite chessboard) that he thinks may never be proved, and showed a snippet
of his CWEB program for the problem.

Knuth is turning 80 in about a month, and his talks seem to get better every
year. (Though last year's lecture on _Hamiltonian Paths in Antiquity,_ which
among other things covers Sanskrit poems that satisfy a “knight's tour”
constraint, holds a special place in my heart — been planning to elaborate on
it.)

