Donald Knuth: I sat on the back desks and bullied jokes, and the teachers humbled themselves and didn’t beat their asses often (1,2,3,7 / 97)

Original author: Web of Stories
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Donald Knut talks about mom and dad, recalls how he learned to read, how he shkodil at school. She talks about the first writing experience and alludes to the Easter eggs with the star of erotica in her books.


Family history




My ancestors lived in Germany in 1840, and by 1870 in America. The whips on the father's side were very diverse. My great-grandfather was from Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), quite close to the border with Denmark and he was the last to move.

00:42 During the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in the 1860s, if I am not mistaken, in 1864, he avoided military service, as did not want to fight against Prussia. He decided to come to America, and, one night, knocking on the window, he told his parents “don’t remember badly” and ended up in Illinois. And then he worked, studied at the blacksmith at that time. He met his wife in America. Her family had also emigrated from the Hanover region (Germany), and they lived in Indiana, all near Chicago. Thus, this part of the family is from different places in Germany.

01:48 Ancestors through my mother emigrated in the 1840s, they were farmers in the lands of Lower Saxony (Germany), in the small town of Bad Essen. Her parents came and became farmers in Ohio, not far from Cleveland. It turns out that my father was born in Chicago, and my mother in Cleveland. Father first began teaching in Cleveland, and there they met. Then he was called to Milwaukee, and although it was quite far from their families, he accepted the offer to become a teacher there.

My mother




I have to talk about my mom, which is a very important part of my life. She was not typical for that time because she had a good job. My parents were the first in the history of our family to have an education. My father went to teach at a college in Chicago, and my mother studied for a year or two as a secretary of legal affairs. And during World War II, she got a job with one person in Milwaukee, who owned and managed several skyscrapers, and she became his personal secretary, and later - the representative of these organizations that owned the property.

By the time of his death, she was already pretty good at it, and she was asked to become the manager of one of the buildings. So she spent all her life doing real estate, large commercial properties in the suburbs of Milwaukee. However, she began to do this when I was five or six years old, but still continued to housekeeping.

01:55 My grandfather was a blacksmith, my great-grandfathers on both sides were engaged in construction and repair. There was no family tradition of getting an education, and I was certainly the first to graduate. In part, this is the story of all of America that more and more people are going to college, but when I was in high school, about 7 or 8 percent of my classmates went to college. And it was considered decent at the time.

Acquaintance with reading and school




It all started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was born in 1938. I don’t remember anything from the first years of my life, but I know a little from the records left by my parents, which were unusual in their way, as regards my acquaintance with reading. All their friends thought that this should not be done, that I would be bored at school if they read me a lot. But I was the youngest “bookworm” in the Milwaukee public library. And this is the earliest thing I know about my past, since they kept a newspaper clipping. It seems that I was then about two and a half years old, and I became a "bookworm" in the Milwaukee library.

00:59 My memories begin from the time when I went to a small school at our church. My father was a teacher there. A teacher in a Lutheran school - this was the work of his life. It’s not worth talking about their salaries, it seems that something is about 10-15 dollars a month. But it was a very sincere, caring community. By and large, we did not care what was happening there in the world, we felt happiness and stability. It was a good place for a child.

01:51 And when I was in the first grade, my dad was a teacher in the second, but then he transferred, so when I was in the second, he already taught in the fourth. When I got into the fourth, he was already in the sixth. And finally, when I reached the sixth grade, he began to teach high school students, so, fortunately, I never had a father as a teacher. There were about 20-25 students in this school, and our teachers weren’t so good at the exact sciences or mathematics, but they were very good at English. For example, in the seventh grade, I remember, some of us remained after classes to study sentence patterns: well, you know, take the sentence and emphasize the subject and predicate, determine the type of sentence. And we studied English well, because our teacher inspired us. Because of this, in high school in English,

And so, the school I went to was Lutheran. People who work in such schools, like my father, treat the matter as their mission, as a vocation to be a good teacher. That is, we were surrounded by people who actually treated us with interest, and not as work that simply exists. Learning was their way to make the world a better place.

04:14 Some people think that church schools teach intolerance, that you should only value people in your circle, etc. But our case was completely different. Yes, it was a good experience. Although, nevertheless, we had one teacher who had prejudices against blacks, but he ... he stood out, and we did not pay attention to him. Therefore, I think it was a good place to grow up, although nothing extraordinary in terms of special knowledge or something like that.

05:12 I think I was a smart guy. I often sat at the back desks and poisoned jokes, and the teachers, not very approving of this, somehow humbled themselves and did not often beat me on the ass. We had good music at school for singing, we also had a lot of freedom: I remember that our group of four or five friends in the fifth or sixth grade was engaged in various small projects. For example, we were able to get a tape recorder - and that was in the 1940s - and tried to write scripts for fictional radio programs, pretending to be on the radio, doing scenes and recording them. My friend and I began to produce a wall newspaper called Newsweak. Yes, of course, it was WEAK who wrote it (note: week is a week, weak is weak).

In this newspaper, we talked about what was happening at school, stuffed it with “bearded” jokes that we met in books, kept a page of riddles and stuff like that. This was my first writing experience. As I already said, English at school was at a high level, so I had a lot of practice with regard to languages, I had the opportunity to do something creative, like these pranks.

About my sense of humor




Skeptical, cynical, I prefer something satirical. Therefore, I liked Mad Magazine : it was a crazy satire on the "sacred cows" of our time. When my friends and I discovered it in high school, we eagerly swallowed every page, and were crazy about Mad (mad about Mad). Before that, as I said, we had bearded jokes, but my friend and I also claimed to be sarcastic and frivolous.

image


00:44 I like to laugh, we always left columns for jokes in the newspaper, and there were unexpected jokes in our graduation class album too.



01:14 And with age this did not go away: you know, in the indexes to my books there are also a lot of simple-hearted jokes that people, perhaps, have not yet found. But someday they will ask me why I have references to Bo Derek in The TeXbook? And it turns out that on all these pages I used the number 10 ( “Ten” - a 1979 feature film, a romantic comedy with Bo Derek in the title role). You see, I always had this ridiculous trait - I do not look at everything too seriously.

Read more


" Donald Knuth:" My Advice to the Young "(93/97) and" Feeling the need to assert oneself "(9/97)

To be continued ...

List of 97 Donald Knuth videos
Youtube playlist

1. Family history
2. Learning to read and school
3. My mother
4. My parents' finances
5. Interests in high school
6. Being a nerd of nerds at high school
7. My sense of humor
8. The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures
9. Feeling the need to prove myself
11. University life: my basketball management system
12. University life: the fraternity system
13. Meeting my wife Jill
14. Bible study at university and a time of personal challenge
15. Extra-curricular activities at Case
16. Taking graduate classes at Case
17. Physics, welding, astronomy and mathematics
18. My maths teacher at Case and a difficult problem
19. My interest in graphs and my first experience of a computer
20. How I got interested in programming
21. Learning how to program on the IBM 650
22. Writing a tic-tac-toe program
23. Learning about Symbolic Optimum Assembly programs
24. The Internal Translator
25. Adding more features to RUNCIBLE
26. Wanting to be a teacher and why I chose to go to Caltech
27. Writing a compiler for the Burroughs Corporation
28. Working for the Burroughs Corporation
29. Burroughs Corporation
30. My interest in context-free languages
31. Getting my PhD and the problem of symmetric block designs with ...
32. Finding a solution to an open problem about projective planes
33. Inception of The Art of Computer Programming
34. 1967: a turbulent year
35. Work on attribute grammars and the Knuth-Bendix Algorithm
36. Being creative in the forest
37. A new field: analysis of algorithms
38. The Art of Computer Programming: underestimating the size of the ...
39. The successful first release of The Art of Computer Programming
40. Inspiration to write Surreal Numbers
41. Writing Surreal Numbers in a hotel room in Oslo
42. Finishing the Surreal Numbers
43. The emergence of computer science as an academic subject
44. I want to do computer science instead of arguing for it
45. A year doing National Service in Princeton
46. ​​Moving to Stanford and wondering whether I'd made the right choice
47. Designing the house in Stanford
48. Volume Three of The Art of Computer Programming
49. Working on Volume four of The Art of Computer Programming
50. Poor quality typesetting on the second edition of my book
51. Deciding to make my own typesetting program
52. Working on my typesetting program
53. Mathematical formula for letter shapes
54. Research into the history of typography
55. Working on my letters and problems with the S
56. Figuring out how to typeset and the problem with specifications
57. Working on TeX
58. Why the designer and the implementer of a program should be the ...
59. Converting Volume Two to TeX
60. Writing a users' manual for TeX
61. Giving the Gibbs lecture on my typography work
62. Developing Metafont and TeX
63. Why I chose not to retain any rights to TeX and transcribed it to ...
64. Tuning up my fonts and getting funding for TeX
65. Problems with Volume Two
66. Literate programming
67. Re-writing TeX using the feedback I received
68. The importance of stability for TeX
69. LaTeX and ConTeXt
70. A summary of the TeX project
71. A year in Boston
72. Writing a book about the Bible
73. The most beautiful 3:16 in the world
74. Chess master playing at Adobe Systems
75. Giving a lecture series on science and religion at MIT
76. Back to work at Stanford and taking early retirement
77. Taking up swimming to help me cope with stress
78. My graduate students and my 64th birthday
79. My class on Concrete Mathematics
80. Writing a book on my Concrete Mathematics class
81. Updating Volumes One to Three of The Art of Computer Programming
82. Getting started on Volume Four of "The Art of Computer ...
83. Two final major research projects
84. My love of writing and a lucky life
85. Coping with cancer
86. Honorary doctorates
87. The importance of awards and the Kyoto Prize
88. Pipe organ music is one of the great pleasures of life
89. The pipe organ in my living room
90. Playing the organs
91. An international symposium on algorithms in the Soviet Union
92. The Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm
93. My advice to young people
94. My children: John
95. My children: Jenny
96. Working on a series of books of my collected papers
97. Why I chose analysis of algorithms as a subject




Translation: Sergey Danshin
Publishing support is Edison , a company that develops CAD systems for electric power systems , and also helps a research institute implement a software module containing a mathematical neural network algorithm for image recognition .

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