Donald Knuth making an Earthshaking Announcement June 30 in San Francisco

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#lectures

by jackfoxy • 16 years ago

167 84 16 years ago

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

Shamiq• 16 years ago

Is he retiring?

anamax• 16 years ago

He took emeritus status several years ago.

He's unlikely to stop working on things that interest him.

kevinpet• 16 years ago

This is his retirement. He retired in order to have time to finish the series.

sown• 16 years ago

Maybe it was hyperbole on his part?

benofsky• 16 years ago

Quite possible!

fbu2• 16 years ago

He's geting a job at Apple and his books will only be able in the iTeX format ?

tokenadult• 16 years ago

Maybe he has a designated successor for TAOCP?

davidw• 16 years ago

LaTeX to be renamed iLaTeX, and Knuth will be creating a group to approve articles written in it, to make sure they don't tarnish its image in any way.

eru4• 16 years ago

Good joke.

Only--Knuth isn't the author of LaTeX.

nzmsv• 16 years ago

OK, so all LaTeX documents will have to be rewritten in pure TeX, because using an extra translation layer produces substandard results.

akadien• 16 years ago

And Jobs isn't the inventor of Objective-C.

Malic• 16 years ago

He's getting a job at Google?

pibefision• 16 years ago

gmail product manager? :)

jey3• 16 years ago

TeX's version number will converge to pi ahead of schedule?

gloob• 16 years ago

More earthshaking: TeX's version number will never converge to pi?

die_sekte2• 16 years ago

Knuth rewrote himself in MMIX. Fully-documented MMIX.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

Knuth has proven pi is not transcendental and is changing the versioning to use the Prouhet-Thue-Morse constant

jmount• 16 years ago

I think announcement the Pi-version number of Tex is the right guess. From the Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX ) that is when Tex freezes and no more bug fixes are allowed (every behavior from that point on is a required backwards compatible feature).

baddox2• 16 years ago

I'm hoping he's discovered if P=NP.

kloncks• 16 years ago

That will indue live up to the "earth shattering" promise.

I think it might be one of the few, if not the only thing, that would live up to that.

sswam2• 16 years ago

or perhaps he can break RSA in polynomial time or something like that

sswam2• 16 years ago

or maybe he's finished another book!!!! :)

baddox2• 16 years ago

From the little I know about Knuth, while he is a bit of a joker, he doesn't seem like the type to make an announcement to hype people up. That either leads me to believe this will actually be something huge, or it's just a joke of some sort.

faragon2• 16 years ago

Why not? In addition, he could demostrate that any given NP problem can be solved in O(N^2) time complexity.

eru4• 16 years ago

I guess that'll be impossible.

jrp• 16 years ago

Haha, good but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_hierarchy_theorem says no.

Dellort4• 16 years ago

That is obviously wrong as there's an N in there. CS professors will tell you the same.

orp• 16 years ago

Sarcasm?

TimothyFitz• 16 years ago

The way my prof told it: "I'm really not sure why people keep asking if P=NP. Of course it does, when N=1."

richcollins• 16 years ago

Dammit you beat me to it :-)

elblanco• 16 years ago

That's exactly what I thought the moment I saw this. The other options are a working quantum computer or he's retiring.

BoppreH• 16 years ago

I would start thinking badly of him if he referred to his retirement announcement as "earthshaking".

philwelch• 16 years ago

Something tells me that if P = NP, they would have to be...delicate about announcing it, given the implications for cryptography.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that P = NP and the NSA is covering it up.

tetha• 16 years ago

You either had to be very, very delicate or you had to spread the knowledge to too many people before they can react properly.

rlpb2• 16 years ago

Assuming that it would be a very complex proof, it might take a while for practical applications to be able to catch up.

dmoney• 16 years ago

How would you go about announcing this delicately? For a security vulnerability, one would tell the vendor first. So, tell all cryptography vendors before everybody else?

ramchip• 16 years ago

I don't think proving N = NP would necessarily give us an easy way to transform any NP problem into a P one. It could be a nonconstructive proof. You would know that a given encryption could possibly be cracked, but not how.

nopassrecover• 16 years ago

I doubt he'd wait until the TeX speaking role to announce that.

halo• 16 years ago

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested the obvious: that The Art Of Computer Programming Vol. 4 - Combinatorial Algorithms is complete.

But that's no fun, so I hope it's something truly earth shattering, like Knuth getting an e-mail address.

imurray• 16 years ago

Given the venue, presumably the announcement will be TeX related.

ighost• 16 years ago

omg what if he came up with a decent syntax for tex? that would be truly earth shattering.

lsb• 16 years ago

He had an email address. He gave it up in the early 90s, when he decided that 15 years of email was enough for any man.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

noonespecial• 16 years ago

However mundane it might actually end up being, I bet it doesn't trump the "announcement that will redefine how cities are built" turning out to be a goofy little scooter.

Tichy• 16 years ago

A magical text with an unbelievable price.

pyre• 16 years ago

I would laugh if it was just something mundane, done in total Andy Kauffman style.

die_sekte2• 16 years ago

Maybe he is doing a pipe organ concert.

amichail• 16 years ago

Has Knuth even looked at TeXmacs yet?

Perhaps he is ignoring it on purpose?

fdb• 16 years ago

He has solved the halting problem?

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

He has halted the problem solving?

unignorant• 16 years ago

Might it be sarcasm/parody? This can be conveyed with unnecessary capital lettering.

jey3• 16 years ago

Hyperbole, probably.

rman666• 16 years ago

To announce he will be posing for a new "Programming, you're doing it wrong" poster.

jey3• 16 years ago

That's John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp.

eru4• 16 years ago

There's also one with Djikstra. Knuth would make a fitting motive, too. Especially for documentation.

Sandman• 16 years ago

Nah, you're all wrong. It's actually this: http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg

Dellort4• 16 years ago

Expect the unexpected; He has made a lateral move into an entirely different business: The porn industry. I do not think he can possibly offer more than he already has to CS so he will now focus on contribution that will primarily benefit the degenerates among us. I believe I heard Paul Graham stating that he would do this as well when he was done with YC as after all he is a man of the future. It's all about staying ahead and being flexible about business.

fbu2• 16 years ago

Most unexpected so far!

Dellort4• 16 years ago

As Paul Graham said "If you can find a way to turn dicking around into a profitable activity then by all means do it!" on his speech on him entering the porn industry(will add source later)

asimjalis2• 16 years ago

To connect this with the 29 other stories here, Literate Programming is also now no longer permitted on the App Store. Tangle and weave on the Android if you must.

jsyedidia• 16 years ago

It's a funny comment, but not really true.

The ctangle program would just strip the comments (both C/C++ comments and TeX commentary) out of a .w file and re-arrange the C/C++ code to the order that the compiler would need to see it. While many other tools would leave tell-tale traces of machine-generated code, the C or C++ files generated by ctangle are really indistinguishable from human-written code, because they are the original human-written code. So Apple couldn't tell that you used Literate Programming, nor would it violate the spirit of the rules. Now I wonder how many people use Literate Programming to program for the iPhone. My guess is zero, which is too bad.

asimjalis2• 16 years ago

It would not violate the spirit but it would violate the letter of the contract. Apple requires that "applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript" and CWEB is neither. Apple forbids literate programs -- only illiterate programs will be permitted in the App Store.

gjm11• 16 years ago

> the C or C++ files generated by ctangle are really indistinguishable from human-written code

The C or C++ files are typically pretty easy to distinguish from code written by normal human beings (no comments, weird formatting, etc.; more ambiguously, LP tends to produce larger functions/methods because you can break things out as LP sections rather than using the facilities of the underlying language), but there wouldn't be any sign of that in the object code. (Not even the larger functions, necessarily, since the compiler could inline them.)

devin• 16 years ago

Maybe he rewrote TAOCP in C?

noamsml2• 16 years ago

So it can be read with the iPhone?

tlholaday• 16 years ago

Jill Knuth is really James Randi.

samratjp• 16 years ago

He's going to write and direct a musical adapted from "The Art Of Computer Programming"

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

Just so Tex and Latex stay the same, I'll be happy :-)

caryme• 16 years ago

He's behind all of the earthquakes of late!

thmz• 16 years ago

Earthshaking like the Segway promise?

buro9• 16 years ago

It could be LaTeX v3... that's been in progress for so long that any major news would be a shock.

dasht• 16 years ago

My guess (sure, I'll add to the noise): he's designating successors for the care, feeding, and future development of TeX. He's "retiring" from TeX. Hence the lead in to the panel session that follows.

But that's just a guess.

Donald Knuth making an Earthshaking Announcement June 30 in San Francisco

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