Donald Knuth: Algorithms, TeX, Life, and The Art of Computer Programming

Donald Knuth is one of the greatest and most impactful computer
scientists and mathematicians ever. He is the recipient in 1974 of
the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computing. He is
the author of the multi-volume work, the magnum opus, The Art of
Computer Programming. He made several key contributions to the
rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms. He
popularized asymptotic notation, that we all affectionately know as
the big-O notation. He also created the TeX typesetting which most
computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, and scientists and
engineers use to write technical papers and make them look
beautiful. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence
podcast. If you would like to get more information about this
podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman
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"LexPodcast".  Episode Links: The Art of Computer Programming
(book set) Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast
players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that
time. 00:00 - Introduction 03:45 - IBM 650 07:51 - Geeks 12:29 -
Alan Turing 14:26 - My life is a convex combination of english and
mathematics 24:00 - Japanese arrow puzzle example 25:42 - Neural
networks and machine learning 27:59 - The Art of Computer
Programming 36:49 - Combinatorics 39:16 - Writing process 42:10 -
Are some days harder than others? 48:36 - What's the "Art" in the
Art of Computer Programming 50:21 - Binary (boolean) decision
diagram 55:06 - Big-O notation 58:02 - P=NP 1:10:05 - Artificial
intelligence 1:13:26 - Ant colonies and human cognition 1:17:11 -
God and the Bible 1:24:28 - Reflection on life 1:28:25 - Facing
mortality 1:33:40 - TeX and beautiful typography 1:39:23 - How much
of the world do we understand? 1:44:17 - Question for God