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)
-
Shift Happens
by Marcin Wichary
(a labor of love, magnificently designed for people who love keyboards)