Happy 74th Birthday Donald Knuth

I recently met the legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford, once at a talk he gave at NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, CA, and later on at Stanford during a public lecture and book signing session at Stanford.  His numerous accomplishments are too many to list here.  Some of them (in no particular order) are listed or discussed at some length by various admirers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere.  I found him as gentle, gracious, humble and generous as he is accomplished.  One of the questions I asked about was a problem solving course that he offered at Stanford to computer science graduate students , which was taped and is available online to watch (See the "aha" Sessions in here).   Another question I asked was about his ideas about faith and religion, especially since I watched one of his talks at google a couple of years earlier on the subject, and I was not quite satisfied with his lack of interest in exploring outside his system of belief in which he was raised, though I respect his choice.  His religiosity and religious beliefs, however, does not prevent him from posing some very important questions that ought to be asked by many, many more people, I think.  And it is clear that Don and I agree on this since he groups theses questions into what he calls "Infrequenty Asked Questions", listed at the second major link of his web-site at Stanford.

Regarding the "aha" sessions of his course on group problem-solving to Stanford computer science graduate students, I should say that I found them extremely interesting and educational, and illustrative of his love for teaching, experimentation in group learning and research, original, and exploratory in nature and spirit.  He said that producing each one hour video of such lectures was the result of about 30 hours worth of video editing work using the devices which was available to him at the time, which demonstrate his extraordinary level of dedication and love for the job.  I assured him that those sessions were a lot of fun to watch, and thanked him for preparing them, though I was certain he did that out of his own calling and passion for what he was doing.

He is a great teacher and educator with lots of passion, energy and enthusiasm for what he does.  And he is so good at whatever it is that he sets his mind and heart on.  I greatly admire the man.  Here is a tribute to this wonderful man who has given so much to the world of computer programming, design and analysis of algorithms and computer science, in general, all by engaging in what he loves so much.  I heard that he is often seen biking on Stanford campus, and so I designed his name into a bike, and also hand-crafted a wooden piece out of it that I hope to present to him in the near future.  Here is an early draft of that design.

And this is a sequence of images of the piece presented as an animated image:

Don't forget to check out his web-site and in particular the Infrequently Asked Questions that he has listed on his web-site.  Here at webofstories.com you can find some short and sweet auto-biographical interviews he gave a couple of years ago that his fans and admirers might find interesting.

 

Last, but not least, Don Knuth has a great sense of humor, as superbly illustrated by a very amusing announcement of his first child, which is published in the recently published collection of his papers entitled "Selected Papers on Fun and Games", where he presents a counter-example to a statement in Peano Arithmetic, in which he aims to demonstrate 1 + 1 = 3.  Quite original and entertaining.