Donald Knuth

I was one of the first.

And also, I got to know quite well Don Knuth.

Wow.

Because he was the advisor of a guy who was a student at the University of Buenos Aires.

And I guess partly it's just that once you've done one, You do more.

I remember a conversation with Don Knuth eons ago where he said that there are people who have written no books, there are people who have written one book, and there are people who have written many books.

And so I guess I'm in that third category, sort of.

Yeah, for me, it's kind of fun.

So someone comes up, he's like, I have three points I want to say.

It was okay, though, because this person was Donald Knuth.

And he was like, it was like in the zero-dimensional case, you can still write the program to verify the answer, because you just choose zero numbers and ask the probability that the sum of their squares is less than one, and it's probability one.

I was like, yeah, touche, Donald Knuth.

Thanks.

So, point is, we've got this answer to our eight-dimensional question, but it's not hard to see how it generalizes.

But Jupyter Notebooks really give you the opportunity to combine your code with explanations and other, other sort of code.

And going back to what Donald Knuth introduced years ago, the idea of literate programming where you're combining code and documentation in the same space.

They also give you a lovely interactive environment.

There's lots of widgets and things you can use really quite easily within Jupyter.

Um, and so I wonder if you could build on, on Andrew, as you're thinking about those intro computer science classes.

It, it, it, it sounds like it really is what you're trying to train them is how do you think about how these systems work? How do you think systematically, um, and break it down? I love that you're all talking about literate programming too, because isn't that, that's Don Knuth, also a Stanford professor, right? That was kind of his big push back, uh, almost, I think it's 40 years ago.

Uh, so yeah.

Yeah.

That's pretty powerful.

If you go back in the day, um, Donald Knuth, uh, started, uh, TeX, which was a word processor that could do formulae and, and, and, and, and, um, and such for academic papers, and it was used very much for that.

So that, that kind of specialization I think we'll see more and more.

Now, then the next question becomes standardization.

The monastic philosophy eliminates almost all shallow work permanently.

This is total cognitive withdrawal, the kind practiced by Donald Knuth, who removed himself from email entirely in 1990, and Cormac McCarthy, who reportedly spent decades writing in a bare, not provided room with no phone.

The bimodal philosophy divides your time into clearly defined deep periods and shallow periods.

Carl Jung's practice of alternating weeks at his retreat in Bollingen with weeks of active clinical practice in Zurich is the classic case.

so David Fuchs.

Cynthia, David, and me all were at Stanford, and David's advisor was Donald Knuth, who was a famous computer scientist, and I knew Donald Knuth as well.

And so Donald Knuth was on my thesis committee.

So Cynthia and I were, I remember back in nineteen ninety... ninety-five, sorry, uh, you know, when I started meeting Cynthia, and I hung out with Dave and Cynthia a lot, right? Because Dave was my co-founder.

You know, Cynthia would be like: "I've come up with this idea for using compute to solve the spam problem in email.

We examined how modern educators solve that by building intelligent tutoring systems armed with a compendium of historical errors and tens of thousands of test cases designed to enforce undeniable, rigorous understanding.

We dug into Donald Knuth's philosophy, exploring why semantic human knowledge isn't enough, and why the unforgiving syntax of programming is the only way to truly call our bluff on what we think we know.

We separated the abstract problem from the concrete problem instance using the bookstore scenario to reveal how human intuition defaults to the greedy algorithm.

Which led us to the trap of the eighteen seventy-five twenty cent coin.