You can now watch Donald Knuth tell his life story and explain the influences and circumstances that led him to achieve his work, as well as what keeps him motivated, on the Peoples Archive website.
Author of the legendary and on-going The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth is a key figure in the computing world. Perhaps best known as the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, he is a renowned and respected computer scientist, recipient of the Medal of Science in 1979, the John von Neumann Medal in 1995, and the Kyoto Prize in 1996.
Launched in May 2004, the Peoples Archive is an online video on-demand archive dedicated to collecting for posterity the life stories of the greatest thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. All the contributors are given an unlimited amount of time to tell their life stories in their own words, with minimum intervention by the "listener," who is generally a colleague with a thorough knowledge of the subject and his/her work. High-quality footage is shot on location in digital video format with subsequent editing kept to a minimum. The interviews are then broken down into individual stories, which are indexed and placed on the Peoples Archive website in QuickTime format.
More than four hours of Donald Knuth discussions are now available, and he spends considerable time explaining the driving force behind the creation of the TeX. Talking in-depth about the creation of TeX, from the initial trigger to the future of the system, he looks back on his decision to start working on it: "My plan had been to go to Chile and spend a year working on Volume Four [of The Art of Computer Programming], my first real sabbatical, and I cancelled that to stay at Stanford and I stopped working on Volume Four, put that on hold starting in April of 1977 and began to say, well, let me spend a year writing computer programs that will make my book look okay again...let's say I finished that in 1985, and so finally, after eight years, I was able to bring my typography project to a conclusion. It was supposed to be a one year project for my sabbatical year."
Knuth has been called the father of the Analysis of Algorithms and he explains his decision to embark in this particular field. He says, "If I consider the entire class of all interesting algorithms, then it's bound to be full of problems just as interesting as queuing and hashing...So that's why, right at that point, I said 'Hmm, that wouldn't be bad...to spend a lifetime on it, because you have a huge number of problems, not only do they have beautiful mathematical structures that tie together, you know, hang together in nice patterns, but also there are customers out there; so that when you solve the problem, the people say, 'Hey, thanks for solving the problem, Don.' So it's a great field to embark in."
The Donald Knuth footage has been broken down into 97 stories, all titled and presented chronologically. They are accompanied by transcripts and additional resources including a complete bibliography, biography, and links to relevant websites.
Donald Knuth's life story is freely available to view on the Peoples Archive website and can also be purchased on DVD-ROM. Peoples Archive currently presents 39 life stories, totaling over 200 hours of video divided into 4677 segments. The Archive is grouped into seven sections: Arts, Literature, Masters, Medicine, Politics, and Science. Future additions to the Archive will include the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell and the physician Sir David Weatherall.
