That's "one hundred ten", not "six"

January 18, 2019 6:15 AM

Donald Knuth Lectures - a playlist of 110 lectures (most of them about an hour long) on TeX, mathematical writing, algorithms, data structures, hardware, cryptography...
posted by Wolfdog (11 comments total)

most of these are over an hour... I'm going to lose a significant portion of my next few months listening to these...
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:06 AM on January 18, 2019

"Infrequently Asked Questions"
posted by johngoren at 7:41 AM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]

Speaking of "six", Mathematical Writing - Examples of Good Style shows us that Knuth doesn't play the bongos but he does try his hand at the recorder. And then...and then...he delves into Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster, giving us this gem of an article from Feynman himself.
posted by storybored at 7:57 AM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]

Pipe organ is really Knuth's musical instrument of choice.
posted by zamboni at 8:12 AM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

This post's title reminds me that there are only 10 types of people in the world.
posted by The Nutmeg of Consolation at 8:17 AM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]

Having cut my teeth on Knuth's outstanding writing, I was dismayed when I discovered that he is not a very good public speaker. Still, it is charming to see him talk, and some of these subjects look like they might be pretty neat. It is always nice to see a really smart person think out loud.

I did get to ask him a question at one of his talks once - he came to MIT to deliver a series of lectures on religion (not the topics I would have chosen to see him speak on, but you take what you can get!). I can even quote verbatim because it made it into the book!

Q: If you were asked to give a lecture for an audience of theologians on the subject of computer science, what would you talk about?

A: A lecture for an audience of theologians? Let me tell you that the amount of terror that lives in a speaker’s stomach when giving a lecture is proportional to the square of the amount he doesn’t know about his audience. Once I gave a series of lectures to biologists at Caltech about computer science, and that was one of the hardest tasks I ever had to face. I guess, however, that I could explain something to the people whose writings I’ve read. I could explain to them some interesting ideas about infinity that they might be able to explore better than I.

Which I thought was a pretty great answer.
posted by dfan at 11:58 AM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

"Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" is a pretty fascinating book. Particularly interesting is the heretical section at the end where he argues that God is finite, although still very large.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:33 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

Took Concrete Mathematics from The Man Himself. Brilliant thinker. Diabolical, hand crafted exams. Stultifying lectures.

Still haven't cashed that bounty check, though. Thinking of what kind of frame it deserves.
posted by skippyhacker at 7:34 AM on January 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

To attach faith and mathematics seems so 19th century to me. I thought it stopped with Cantor and Husserl.
posted by idiopath at 2:54 PM on January 19, 2019

I was dismayed when I discovered that he is not a very good public speaker.

Definition of synergy: Teaming Donald Knuth with the Hungarian Quicksort folk dancers.
posted by Chitownfats at 6:35 PM on January 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

To attach faith and mathematics seems so 19th century to me. I thought it stopped with Cantor and Husserl.

The lectures are really about Knuth trying to come to a personal understanding of scripture and faith, it's just that for him this means seeing things through the lens of theoretical computer science.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:46 PM on January 21, 2019