knuth-interview-2006

w, he posted these numbers, and the Case News Service was always good at trying to plant interesting stories in the local paper, so they sent reporters out [...] and IBM heard about it. So IBM sent out [a camera crew] to make a film of me spotting a game, [...] our Case team playing basketball [...] how I would punch the cards, you know, and put it into the IBM computer. Before they took the shot of the IBM computer, they planted a great, big IBM sign on the machine, so that nobody could fail to miss it [...] and it’s getting printed out on the IBM printer, and then the Coach is looking at it and posting this up. > So this was a little movie that I was in, about two or three minutes long. IBM supplies this movie to CBS, and they put it on the Sunday Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and all my relatives in Florida can see me on TV. This was very exciting. Also US News and World Report ran a story about it, and so this was my connection between computing and sports, when I was at Case. This was also a clever way for IBM to get their advertisements in there, rather subtly, but it was fun. > That was when I first realized how hard it must be to be a movie star, because I had to walk through these scenes six times everything, you know, punch those cards over and over again. How could Audrey Hepburn possibly look so beautiful after the sixth take, you know? (Thanks to https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006 for transcribing the videos.)

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

lems; 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.