Lex Fridman Podcast: #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life

Lex Fridman Lex Fridman 9/9/21 - Episode Page

Donald Knuth is a computer scientist, Turing Award winner, father of algorithm analysis, author of The Art of Computer Programming, and creator of TeX. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

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OUTLINE:

Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) – Introduction

(07:02) – First programs

(30:26) – Literate programming

(33:35) – Beauty in programming

(39:30) – OpenAI

(48:41) – Optimization

(54:46) – Consciousness

(1:03:29) – Conway’s game of life

(1:16:16) – Stable marriage

(1:19:35) – Richard Feynman

(1:30:29) – Knuth-Morris-Pratt Algorithm

(1:40:02) – Hardest problem

(1:57:41) – Open source

(2:02:54) – Favorite symbols

(2:12:27) – Productivity

(2:20:08) – Meaning of life