Recent News

[click here to zip down to the schedule of public lectures]

An Awesome Year

Best wishes to everyone for a happy 2009, aka MMIX!

Did you know that 2009 is (1/2+3)*(4+5*(6*7+8*9))?

The Stanford GraphBase is now out in paperback!

Addison--Wesley has just published The Stanford GraphBase in a spiffy new paperback edition. I've completely rewritten Chapter 3, and made dozens of other refinements throughout. This is a book that I use almost daily while writing The Art of Computer Programming, so I'm really happy to see the new printing. (Hint, hint: It should make a terrific graduation present for a Comp Sci major...)

Volume 4, Fascicle 1, is here

Paperback previews of new material for The Art of Computer Programming, called ``fascicles,'' have been published occasionally since 2005. I'm pleased to announce the arrival of the latest installment, which plugs the gap between Fascicle 0 and Fascicle 2. It deals with

and is cram-packed with lots of new stuff among nearly 500 exercises and answers to exercises.

Together with Fascicles 0, 2, 3, and 4, it makes a total of 818 pages (not counting front matter and indexes), which will eventually form the content of Volume 4A (planned for late 2010 or early 2011), once the material has been thoroughly checked.

Note to Computer Science professors: I've heard that some college courses for grad students and advanced undergrads are being based on one or more of these fascicles. Please let me know about your experiences, if you try such an experiment.

Note to Internet friends: I'm extremely grateful that hundreds of you have taken time to read these drafts, and to detect and report errors that you've found. Your comments have improved the material enormously. But I must confess that I'm also disappointed to have had absolutely no feedback so far on several of the exercises on which I worked hardest when I was preparing this material. Could it be that (1) you've said nothing about them because I somehow managed to get the details perfect? Or is it that (2) you shy away from the more difficult stuff, being unable to spend more than a few minutes on any particular topic? Although I do not like to think that readers are lazy, I fear that hypothesis (1) is far less likely than hypothesis (2). I may have to remove material that nobody cares about. But I still cling to a belief that these details are extremely instructive. Thus I would like to enter here a plea for some readers to tell me explicitly, ``Dear Don, I have read exercise N and its answer very carefully, and I believe that it is 100% correct,'' where N is one of the following:

Remember that you don't have to work the exercise first; you're allowed and even encouraged to peek at the answer. Please send success reports to the usual address for bug reports (taocp@cs.stanford.edu), if you have time to provide this extra help. Thanks in advance!

Author talk at Google

On March 16 I spoke in the Authors@Google series, about interactions between religion and science. They've posted it here!

Interview by Richard Morris

See Geek of the Week, 26 November 2009, which focuses on aspects of technical writing.

Did you borrow a video from me?

Videotapes of most of my Computer Musings have been made since 1998, and I have often loaned copies to people who were unable to attend in person.

Now there is good news and bad news. The good news is that dozens of these videos have been digitized, and they are available for viewing. The bad news is that three people have not returned the tapes they borrowed, and there is no backup copy; I learned recently that my copy was unique, because all the master tapes were erased. If you are the person who currently has any of the following tapes:

please PLEASE return it/them immediately.

A blast from the past

I learned recently that my 33-year-old paper on the early history of programming languages unfortunately omitted an important development because I had failed to look carefully for sources in Canada. Future printings of my book Selected Papers on Computer Languages will rectify this oversight. Furthermore, thanks to archivist Marnee Gamble, I'm able to post three interesting documents from the Patterson Hume Fonds at the University of Toronto Archives, which show how the system was described by its authors at the time of its introduction:

the user manual
TRANSCODE: A system of coding for the Ferranti MARK I Computer by J. N. P. Hume and B. H. Worsley (Computing Centre, University of Toronto, 1 October 1954), 17 pages
appendix to the user manual
A continuation of the preceding document, pages i--viii
supplement to the user manual
TRANSCODE library functions (Computing Centre, University of Toronto, April 1957), 14 pages

Message to Hannah Terret (née Terrett)

The Palin-drome I was trying to recall is: ``All I saw: Wasilla.''

Public lectures

Although I must stay home most of the time and work on books that I've promised to complete, I do occasionally get into speaking mode. Here is a current schedule of events that have been planned for this year so far:

Monday, 9 March, 4:15pm in room 200-002 (History Corner basement)
lecturing about "Priority sampling" to Stanford class CS345A (guests are welcome)
Thursday, 21 May, 4pm at Oxford Comlab
lecturing about "Sheep, goats, and Gilbreath"
Tuesday, 26 May, 4:15pm at Oxford Comlab
lecturing about "Priority sampling"
Saturday, 30 May, 4:00pm at Rewley House, Oxford
speaking about Surreal Numbers as part of a workshop on Mathematics and Fiction sponsored by the British Society for the History of Mathematics
Tuesday, 02 June, 2:00pm at Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
speaking on "history of computer science versus history of mathematics"
Friday, 25 September, 3:30pm at Stanford Memorial Church
playing the organ for Rajeev Motwani's memorial celebration
Tuesday, 08 December, 5:30pm at Skilling Auditorium
A Computer Musing entitled ``Spanning trees and aspects'' [the fifteenth annual Christmas Tree Lecture]

Click here for the ``recent news'' that was current at the end of 2008, if you're interested in old news as well as new news.

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