Wednesday, October 31, 2007

A Computer Literacy interview with Donald Knuth

A couple of days back, googling some time away while waiting for a flight at the airport, I happened to glean across an interview with Donald Knuth. It was taken around 1993 by Computer Literacy after the publication of his books on CWEB and The Stanford Graphbase. Besides talking about the obvious topics that you would expect out of a Knuth session, he also ruminates on his many other passions like music, piano and writing. We all know Knuth's obsession with TeX and METAFONT. But did you know that the Father of Analysis of Algorithms is an expert in piano music ? He says :
I would like to have friends come to the house and play four-hands piano music. If I could do it every week, I would. I hope to live long enough so that after I've finished my life's work on The Art of Computer Programming, I might compose some music. Just a dream... it might be lousy music, of course.

Go, read the whole piece .. it's a wonderful read about some of the thoughts of the legend.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

That link to the PDF seems to not work. You can try one of the following:
karthikr.wordpress.com cache
Google Cache

Unknown said...

Thanks for pointing it out .. I have updated the link with a different URL ..