
Donald Knuth speaks about his life [video] - thedayisntgray
http://www.webofstories.com/playAll/donald.knuth
======
kragen
I hate watching videos, and the transcript as provided was just unreadable, so
in 2010 I put the transcript on GitHub and started reformatting it:
[https://github.com/kragen/knuth-
interview-2006](https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006)

Pull requests welcome!

~~~
timtadh
The transcript is very nice thank you for putting it together. You are right
though, I hate the bold face. Luckily a quick trip to the developer tools took
care of it. A better way to index large bodies of free form text is a topic
index that points to the correct areas of the text for phrases and topics.
These are sometimes known as concordances. That way the reader can decide what
is important to them rather than letting you decide.

~~~
kragen
Thanks for the feedback!

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thesmallestcat
Maybe it's just genetics, but the thing about this video that I've never been
able to get out of my head is how a smile is etched into Knuth's face. Even
happy elderly folks usually have heavy, distinctive frown wrinkles, and you
almost never see cheek wrinkles like these, let alone so pronounced. Maybe the
way Knuth aged only indicates that he doesn't grimace when concentrating as
most of us do, but I like to think a lifetime of smiling is responsible for
the appearance. Whenever I get into the rut of thinking that life is a steady
decline into loneliness and dissatisfaction, memories of this video remind me
to be positive and playful.

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jhbadger
I highly recommend the "Web of Stories" site in general -- many scientists and
other people of note have given interviews about their lives and work there.
As many of them are elderly, it is good that somebody gets them to do this
before it is too late. Already we have people like Minsky and Mandelbrot that
we can no longer ask about their lives but whose stories are archived on the
site.

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HiroshiSan
What a wonderful interview. It's very comforting to know that Knuth worked
very very hard. It seemed like he had to overcome a lot of gaps in his
knowledge (if that's the right way to put it) because of the environment he
grew up in, yet he made the most out of the cards he was dealt.

Where most would give up, Knuth worked harder. What an inspiring man.

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joaorico
I like these two quotes of Knuth where he lets us know how hard he worked.

\--

From this other small interview [1]:

"When I'm working on a research problem I generally begin by filling dozens of
sheets of scratch paper with partial calculations. When I eventually get to a
point where I can think about the problem while swimming, then I'm often ready
to solve it."

\--

From OP's interview [2]:

"So I went to Case, and the Dean of Case says to us, says, it’s a all men’s
school, says, “Men, look at, look to the person on your left, and the person
on your right. One of you isn’t going to be here next year; one of you is
going to fail.” So I get to Case, and again I’m studying all the time, working
really hard on my classes, and so for that I had to be kind of a machine.

I, the calculus book that I had, in high school we — in high school, as I
said, our math program wasn’t much, and I had never heard of calculus until I
got to college. But the calculus book that we had was great, and in the back
of the book there were supplementary problems that weren’t, you know, that
weren’t assigned by the teacher. The teacher would assign, so this was a
famous calculus text by a man named George Thomas, and I mention it especially
because it was one of the first books published by Addison-Wesley, and I loved
this calculus book so much that later I chose Addison-Wesley to be the
publisher of my own book.

But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our
teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that.
I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had
supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems;
I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t
learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it
took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working
on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those
problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems,
and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to
solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know,
that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than
always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve."

[1] [http://authenticinquirymaths.blogspot.pt/2015/11/maths-in-
sc...](http://authenticinquirymaths.blogspot.pt/2015/11/maths-in-science-
interview-with-don.html)

[2] Transcript from here: [https://github.com/kragen/knuth-
interview-2006](https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006)

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partycoder
I hope he offers a reward check for any inaccuracy in his interview.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check)

