Retirement

I retired early because I realized that I would need at least 20 years of full-time work to complete The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), which I have always viewed as the most important project of my life.

Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid.

My full-time writing schedule means that I have to be pretty much a hermit. The only way to gain enough efficiency to complete The Art of Computer Programming is to operate in batch mode, concentrating intensively and uninterruptedly on one subject at a time, rather than swapping a number of topics in and out of my head. I'm unable to schedule appointments with visitors, travel to conferences or accept speaking engagements, or undertake any new responsibilities of any kind. I'm glad that the WWW makes it possible for me to respond to questions that I don't have to see or hear.

I miss teaching and daily interaction with students, but I get stimulating feedback by giving regular public lectures and speaking to informal Stanford seminars.

I'm proud of the 28 students for whom I was a dissertation advisor (see vita); and I know that 28 is a perfect number. So I won't be advising any more students. But I do say that if somebody solves one of the open problems stated in one of my Computer Musings, within about two or three weeks of the time I stated it, I'll sign their thesis. (After two or three weeks, I'll be working on something else and won't have time to read their work.)

I tend to spend about two hours per day in the library, about a half hour in AEORC Rec Pool, and the rest of the time at home reading and writing, sometimes also sleeping and eating. I like to play piano and organ in the music room of my house, although lately I haven't had nearly as much time for music as I would like. If you're good at sightreading four-hands piano music, I have hundreds of pieces I'd like to try playing with you; please drop me a note and we can hopefully get together for a jam session. By the way, I'm also a big fan of the Stanford Theatre.

Of course I like to read nontechnical books, although I read very slowly. Here are some that I heartily recommend:

• Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec (perhaps the greatest 20th century novel) (see Willy Wauquaire's superb webpages about it)
• Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers (captures Oxford high-table small-talk wonderfully)
• An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (also Oxford but in the 1660s)
• Death of a Salesperson by Robert Barnard (who is at his best in short stories like these)
• Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (in-depth characters plus a whole philosophy)
• On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (applied biochemistry in the kitchen)
• Food by Waverley Root (his magnum opus, a wonderful history of everything delicious)
• The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (the Great California Novel, entirely in 14-line sonnets)
• The Age of Faith by Will Durant (volume 4 of his series, covers the years 325--1300)
• Efronia by Stina Katchadourian (diaries and letters of a remarkable Armenian woman)
• The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel (biographies of Ramanujan and Hardy)
• Hackers by Steven Levy (incredibly well written tale of our times)
• The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (one of their brilliantly Swedish detective novels)
• Blasphemy by Douglas Preston (the best novel to deal with "science versus religion" that I've ever encountered)
• Blacklist by Sara Paretsky (a brilliant characterization of the tragic state of politics and class relations in America that also happens to be an action-packed murder mystery)
• The Travels of Ibn Battutah edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (fascinating and eye-opening journal by a 14th-century Muslim scholar)
• Murder in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn (delicious caricature of academic follies)
• America (The Book): Teacher's Edition “A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction” by Jon Stewart et al (has graffiti even better than the marginal notes in Concrete Mathematics)
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick (vivid, witty, hilarious, poignant: I laughed, I cried, I learned; demonstrates the unreasonable effectiveness of a graphic novel)
• Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (about how Paul Farmer's local and global life combined theory and practice)
• A Dual Autobiography by Will and Ariel Durant (superbly written, a great story about how a man and woman can work creatively and sustainably together despite the mysteries of the human sex drive)
• The Hornet's Nest by Jimmy Carter (a revolutionary novel about the Revolutionary War at all levels)
• Lifeline Rule by Doug Nufer (the rule: parity to vowel; an awesome conovowel opus)
• Inventing the Future by Albert Cory (a novel way to explain how advances in software require lots of time and lots of complementary skills)
• Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents by Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft (proving again the great value of access to original sources and ephemera)
• Becoming by Michelle Obama (brilliantly written on many levels)
• mobituaries by Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg (great writing about hundreds of interesting facts, including the “Byronic woman” Ada Lovelace)
• The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig (lively and moving chronicle of European intellectual life, 1900–1940, and the madness of war)

Don Knuth's home page