Thermal Noise

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

Here are the said notes from Knuth’s lecture on Valentine’s Day 2008. There was no specific topic that the Don spoke on. It was more of a Q/A session than a lecture. However there were few short questions and long insightful answers

(A day after the lecture, I did a full transcript which I seem to have misplaced. What follows is a reconstruction from the short-hand notes that I took during the Don’s talk. Due to the peculiar way in which Long-Term memory is reinforced in the human brain, we are capable of making grossly false recollections and delude ourselves into beliving it to be the gospel truth. I have tried best to stick to the words that I took down with no superfluous explanation. But be warned about the limitations of the cerebral cortex. The gist of the ideas and most of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were mostly by the original speaker. But the correctness of pronouns, infinitives, sentence ordering and in general a guarantee of authentic tone are in no way implied.)

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Its 4 a.m in the morning. I haven’t slept in 24 hours. I am still wondering if this is a dream or a dream within a dream.Without much ado, I have just listened to for more than an hour and spoke a word to Donald Ervine Knuth himself, albeit over the telephone on the wrong side of the Atlantic. It was the Don’s Lecture at Sun’s Menlo Park campus on Valentine’s Day and I sneaked in with a friend.

Euphoria is very hard to describe … I will stop !

P.S: I am on a scheduled break from blogging. But this was far too tempting to resist. The transcript of his talk and more details may appear at a later date