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资源说明：The transcript of a Donald Knuth interview in 2006
Donald Knuth Interview 2006 =========================== This is a transcript of an interview with the guy by Dikran Karagueuzian, the director of CSLI Publications, videotaped in 2006. Copyright 2006 Web of Stories Ltd., but the version of the transcript on their web site is just unreadable; this is my effort to clean it up a bit. It’s about 63 000 words, so it is probably around three or four hours of reading. Printed, it would be about 110 pages. Patches to improve the formatting and correct errors are welcome. Please don’t refill the paragraphs, though; it creates unnecessary merge conflicts. I know **lots of people are going to hate the random boldface**. But the interview, like any record of an extempore speech, is not really organized into headings, subheadings, and the like. The boldface is my attempt to pull out the main topics of each paragraph so that it’s possible to skim through the document to find a particular topic. [1 - Family history](http://webofstories.com/play/17060) -------------------------------------------------------- If you want to go way back, if you go like, 16 of my **great-great-grandparents, in 1840 they all would have been in Germany, but by 1870, they all were in America**. So if you know, consider all the different lines. My mother; my father’s, the Knuth part of my ancestry was the most diverse, in a way. He came from Schleswig-Holstein, rather near the border with Denmark, and he was the last to come over; during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in the 1860s; I think it was 1864, probably, he went AWOL from the army; he didn’t want to fight against the Prussians, and he decided to come to America, and knocked on the window one night, and told his parents, I’m out of here, and wound up in Illinois, and then worked, learned to be a blacksmith at that time. So then his wife was somebody he met in America. She had come — her family had come over earlier from the Hannover area, and she lived in Indiana, all very near Chicago area, and so that part of the family is from a different part of Germany. My mother’s side came; they all emigrated in 1840s, and they were **farmers in the area of what is now Niedersachsen**; it’s a small town in Germany called **Bad Essen**, and they, her family came and were farmers in Ohio, near Cleveland, Ohio. So they, yeah, the background then is, my father’s side round Chicago, where he was born and grew up, and my mother’s side from Cleveland Ohio, where she was born. My dad’s first teaching assignment was in Cleveland, and that’s where he met my mom. Then he got a call to Milwaukee, which was way far from any of their, you know, anybody else in the family, because it was a job that opened up, so he went and took this job at a school that needed a teacher. [2 - Learning to read and school](http://webofstories.com/play/17061) --------------------------------------------------------------------- It all started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, **1938, I was born**. I don’t remember anything about the first few years of my life, but I know a little bit from records that my parents kept that they were kind of unusual at that time, in introducing me to reading. All of their friends said that I shouldn’t, that I would be bored in school if they would do much reading for me, before I actually went to school, but I was — I guess I was the youngest bookworm in the Milwaukee Public Library. So that’s the first, news I have from the past, because they saved a newspaper clipping. I guess I was like **two and a half years old and I had become a bookworm at the Milwaukee Library**. I start remembering things more when I get, you know, when I get into school, and I went to a small school at our church. **My father was a teacher** there. His life’s work was to be an educator in the Lutheran School System, and their salaries weren’t much to speak of. I think, I think it was something like ten or $15 a month. But it was a very warm, loving community. We were pretty much ignorant of what’s going on in the world, but happy and sort of a stable, nice place to grow up. And when I was in First Grade my dad was the Second Grade teacher, but then he moved on so that when I got into the Second Grade he was the Fourth Grade teacher, and when I got into Fourth Grade, he was the Sixth Grade teacher. And finally, when I got into Sixth Grade, he went on to teach in high school, so, fortunately, I never had my dad as one of my teachers. In this school we had about oh, I think 20, 25 kids, and our teachers weren’t real strong on Science or Mathematics, they were, but they were pretty good in English. They- like in Seventh Grade, I remember, that several of us would spend time after school, diagramming sentences; you know, take sentences of English that weren’t in the book, and figure out what’s the subject and the predicate, and how do the, you know, how do the phrases go in, so we, our teacher inspired us to know a lot about the English language, and by the time we got to high school, the teachers there in high school really didn’t know that much about English, so that was the only time I remember being bored, because we already knew everything that they were going to teach us in high school. So **the high school I went to, again, was a Lutheran high school**. The people who work in these schools are, like my dad, doing it as kind of a mission, or, I don’t know, not, they consider it their life’s calling to be good teachers, and so we really had people who took a genuine interest in us, and were not, not in their job just because it was a job, but because it was something that they felt was an important service to the world. Some people think that the church schools are places where they teach intolerance and you know, that you’re supposed to only be, what do you say anyway? Only, only be appreciating of people who are like you, and so on, but that was absolutely not the case. I think we had a very good experience and it was, there was, **one of my teachers was a little bit prejudiced against blacks**, but he stood out, and we didn’t pay any attention to him. So it was a, I think a really nice way to grow up, but nothing world class, in any sense of special, or, you know, special knowledge or unusual. I think I was kind of a wise guy, I think, I’d often sit in the back of the class and crack jokes, and **the teachers didn’t, didn’t really like**, the way, you know, **my attitude**. But you know, they learned to live with it, and I didn’t get, I didn’t get spanked too often. We had good music also, in the school, for singing, and, but we also had a lot of freedom, so I remember like, we had a circle of four or five friends, and when we were in Fifth and Sixth Grade, we started doing some little projects, like we got hold of a tape recorder, this was in the 1940s, and we tried to write scripts for fake radio programs, and we **pretended we were on the radio**, and we put on these little shows, and recorded them. My friends and I **started a school newspaper**. We called it “**Newsweak**”, spelled W, E, A, K, of course. And in that paper we would tell stories about things going on in the school, but also we recycled a lot of corny jokes we had seen in books, and had a puzzle page and things like that. But that was when I, I had **my first experience in writing**, and as I say, we had good English in that school, so from early on, I had a lot of training in things that had to do with languages, and then a chance to do some creative work with things like these skits. [3 - My mother](http://webofstories.com/play/17062) --------------------------------------------------- I should say something about my mom, who was also very important in my life, of course. She was unusual also at that time, because she had a good job. My **parents were the first** in their families, in the whole history of our family, **to have some kind of education**. My dad had gone to a teachers training college in Chicago, and my mother had taken one or two years of training as a secretary, as a legal secretary. And in the, during the Second World War, she got a job working for a man in downtown Milwaukee, who owned and managed several of the skyscrapers in town, downtown, and she became his personal secretary, and later a Trustee of the, of these, of some of the organisations that owned the property, and the time of his death she was, she had been doing rather well, and was asked to be, asked to be the manager of one of the buildings, so **she spent her life working in real estate in Milwaukee** with the large commercial buildings in the downtown area. And she had started doing this part time work, when I was five or six years old, but still doing everything else at home, as well. My, but my grandfather was, my great-grandfather was a blacksmith, my grandfather was, my grandfathers on both sides, were in construction work, and maintenance. There was **not a family tradition of education, and I certainly was the first one ever** to go on to higher levels of education. It’s partly the story of America, of course, that more and more people are going to college, but when I was in high school, at that time still, it was, I think something like 7% or 8% of my classmates went on to college, and that was considered pretty good at that time.) [4 - My parents’ finances](http://webofstories.com/play/17063) -------------------------------------------------------------- I guess I can say a little bit more about my parents’ finances. Of course **they were married during the Depression**, and my dad’s first job, when he came to Milwaukee, they decided after a year, that they should cut his salary by $5 a month, and they told him that he would learn thrift, and he would, you know, this would be good for him, to, and of course the church was always having trouble with fundraising, but **our family didn’t have an automobile till 1951**, which is when I was in Seventh Grade. We took our first, you know, auto trip at that time, to my mother’s family in Ohio. Before that we had gone once or twice a year by train, and rarely would relatives from Illinois or Ohio be able to come to visit us. We, my dad would always ride his bicycle to work, and my mother, well, **Milwaukee had good public transportation, and in fact it was a very safe city**; completely different from now, when, because of drugs and things now, but when I was growing up, I could, I would always ride the streetcar downtown at all hours of the day and night. Now you take your life in your hands doing this. You know, no parent would let their child do any of the things that we were doing. I was, once I took the streetcar; I don’t know how old I was, but I think it was, you know, maybe Fourth or Fifth Grade, and I took the streetcar downtown, and **went to the public library**, and I started reading books, and I didn’t know that the library hours, that the library was closing, and the lights went off, so I went over to a window, where I could sit, and I kept reading, and finally the people, you know, and my parents didn’t, were wondering what happened to me, why didn’t I come home? But somebody at the library found me, you know, just in the stacks, reading the books, and but you know, still they wouldn’t worry too much about letting kids go around the city, and so my mother would take the streetcar downtown to her work, and we never thought of having an automobile until they could finally afford something from the little jobs that my dad would take outside of his teaching experience. He would; he and his friends got together and they **invested in the stock market, what they called penny stocks**. You could buy stocks in various mining companies. He met a man at the, I think it was at a, what do you call it? A bathhouse? Or, you know, a public bath, where you can go for a hot bath, and met a man there who introduced him to some people from Colorado who were into mining and so then they decided they were going to make some money this way. Well, I inherited all these stock certificates now, which make **great wallpaper**, but they, you know; they’re **completely useless**. One of the stocks, however, did well. It was called Silver Bell Mine, and we’ve, eventually we went out to Colorado, visited the place, and saw the, you know, we, the stock was sold to Union Oil eventually, and made a little bit of money on that. So, and **my parents bought stock in Walt Disney**, and that kept doubling and multiplying. So by working hard and saving money, throughout my mom’s life; she died at almost age 90, and she never retired, she stayed working in real estate, even in her late 80s they had an office for her downtown, and she could come in, maybe three days a week, and, but putting money in the bank, and being a generous person, and contributing to charity and so on, but **she had accumulated an estate of more than $1 million**, by the time that she died. And **this surprised everybody** including her. But they were, my dad was the bookkeeper for the high school, and so he took some classes in accounting, and so he spent a lot of his time actually filling out what we’d call spreadsheets now. And he’d stay keeping track of little transactions with stocks. The, so, I think it’s interesting to see that the way **they could, just by being responsible citizens, make a good life for themselves**, the way the times were in our country at that period. And this idea of personal responsibility was something I always took for granted, because I got it from my parents. So it never occurred to me that there was any other way to live. [5 - Interests in high school (Part 1)](http://webofstories.com/play/17064) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back in high school, my main activities in high school, at, it was called Lutheran High School, and then during my Senior year it split into two schools, Milwaukee Lutheran High School, which was the one I’d went to, and Wisconsin Lutheran High School. **1956 was the year I graduated**, and that, well, the place where again I didn’t have special, teachers who were specialists in a world class sense, but they were always real interested in nurturing us. I went on to be a mathematician, but the math, but I didn’t have any interest very much in Math at the time in high school, because my, I would ask questions to my teachers, and they didn’t know the answer. So I could prove that one was equal to zero, and they couldn’t find any mistakes in the proof, and so you know, I couldn’t, and so, why should I go in, you know, go into mathematics? So my main interest at that time was in music, and also in physics. My chemistry/physics teacher was a wonderful man, who sort of wrote his own textbook, he designed the chemical experiments, and I had a great admiration for him, and he encouraged me to you know, to think some about physics, and although I spent most of my time in music, outside of school. In fact I, well I played the piano with the high school chorus, I sang in the chorus, I was in the band, I played the saxophone and I played the tuba in the band, and I played, you know, in the All-City, the Milwaukee All-City Band, or Symphonic Band. **I wrote music**, I arranged music for bands. I had, I had, at the time I took a; I was a big fan of ***Mad Magazine***. And also of Roger Price, if anybody remembers Roger Price, and he had written a short story called “Milton and the Rhinoceros”. And so I made a take off on Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”, with the words from “Milton and the Rhinoceros”. I was very naïve at the time; I had no idea about copyrights, or anything, so I **took Prokofiev’s music, and I scored it for band, and I took Roger Price’s words**, “Milton and the Rhinoceros”, and I made this, this piece for, I don’t know, 20 minutes or something like this, for our, for our high school band to perform. And I proudly gave this to our band director, and he lost it, and I’ve never seen it again. So I have no idea whether it’s any good, or whatever, but there it was. [6 - Interests in high school (Part 2)](http://webofstories.com/play/17065) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I also **started the school newspaper**. I was Editor of the paper, and during my Senior year, I would do an all-nighter every Monday night. I stayed up the whole night, getting the paper done by seven o’clock in the morning. We didn’t have a professional way to produce it, so I produced it on a mimeograph machine, which was something that’s way obsolete now, but it uses very greasy ink, and the reason I did that was because we happened to have one at our house. My dad did part time work for an architect in Milwaukee, printing up the specifications, and you know, he could make a little freelance money this way to supplement his meagre salary, and he also used this machine to typeset music for local choirs, and so I had this machine at home, and also some electric typewriter that he had, or maybe my mother had; anyway we had it at home, so **I could produce our school newspaper at home**, without having to worry about fancy typesetting, but we had a lot of reporters, and I wrote some features for it, like crossword puzzles, and things like that. So again, I was doing **a lot of writing in my spare time, during high school**. I worked on the Yearbook and other publications as well, and friends of mine, friends and I wrote plays that were put on by groups in the high school. So it was a fun time. But I would say at that part of my life I was pretty much a, like a machine, an autom-, I mean I was just, I would just learn, absorb stuff, and take tests and you know, **get 100% on the tests** if I could, without really sitting back and taking a look at finer things in life, or something like this. I was a, I was a dutiful child who said, okay, you’re supposed to go to school Don, so I went to school, and you’re supposed to learn, so I learned, and I had fun on the side with some of these writing projects, but **I really wouldn’t read a book unless it was assigned to me**. Sometimes I would read, I remember, **I’m a very slow reader**, and I remember *Bleak House*, by Charles Dickens, with 60, 70 chapters, and I, it took me so long to read it that I had to use it for two book reports instead of one, and I didn’t; so it wasn’t **until I was in my 30s** before I actually found some of the great literature of the world and read it for my own pleasure. In high school, well I guess I was a fairly successful machine, because they said that my, okay, in those days they didn’t give just letter grades, like A, B, C, but they gave a number grade, and based on you know, when you took an exam, they would average these scores, and they would grade your homework and it was all based on a zero to 100 system, and they said that **my average which was more than 97.5 was a record for the school** that hadn’t been achieved before, so I was pretty much **a nerd of nerds** at that time. [7 - My sense of humor](http://webofstories.com/play/17066) ----------------------------------------------------------- Rather than sceptical, cynical, I would prefer satirical or something. KARAGUEUZIAN: Satirical. KNUTH: But anyway, that’s why I liked *Mad Magazine*, because it was like crazy type of satire on the sacred cows of the day, and so when my friends and I discovered in high school, you know, we devoured every page, and it was a special, you know, **mad about *Mad***. We, and before that, as I said, I had the corny jokes, but my friends and I tended to be wise-cracking and not to take things too seriously. Although I said I was a machine, but I did also like to laugh, and so when I was writing for the paper, we always had sections about jokes, and we always had you know, in our Yearbook we had fun things in there that weren’t expected. So I’ve carried that through, as you know, and many; there are **lots of corny jokes in the indexes to my books** now that people probably haven’t discovered yet, but somebody will ask me, why do I have a reference to Bo Derek in *The TeXbook*? And it turns out that just all the pages which are cited in the index for Bo Derek is where I used the number ten, so all the way through I’ve had this silly streak of some sort that means I don’t take everything too seriously. [8 - The Potrzebie System of Weights and Meausures and the Alfred E. Neuman crossword](http://webofstories.com/play/17067) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While I’m on the subject of *Mad Magazine*, I might as well mention that then **I did a project in my senior year**, which was submitted to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, well, no, first to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which is now called the Intel Science Talent Search or something, but it’s a nationwide competition, and it was called the Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures. This is a Polish word that was very popular in *Mad Magazine*, and I decided to base a system of weights and measures that was going to be better than the metric system. It was based on the thickness of *Mad Magazine* number 26, or something like this, and that was taken as one potrzebie of length. And then we had, you know, a kilo potrzebie was 1,000 of those, and a fershlugginer potrzebie was a million — and a farshimmelt potrzebie one millionth. We had units of time, weight, everything, in the system. And it **won honorable mention in this Science Talent Search**, and also was, I did some demos at the Academy of Sciences; it won an award in Wisconsin. I submitted it them to ***Mad Magazine*, and they published it**; they paid me $25, for it, and it came out in, during the spring of my Freshman year in college, and this was my first technical publication, so it is listed on my vita, you know, and publication number one is the Potrzebie System of Weights and measures, and it was published later in paperback in one of the *Mad* reprints, and it, and I used it as a basis of running for student government in college, and it failed miserably, you know, I didn’t get elected. I also sent a sequel to *Mad*, which was a crossword puzzle. One of their, the Alfred E. Neuman figure is one of the, was featured on lots of their articles, and this silly boy’s face with the missing tooth, and when I looked at his teeth, I could see, you know, white squares and black squares, reminding me of a crossword puzzle. So I added more white squares and black squares up in his forehead area, and where his hair is, and I filled, and I made that into **a crossword puzzle with *Mad*-type clues**, like, you know, “blank, me worry?”, or something like this, and I submitted that, and they rejected that, you know, they didn’t want, but I’ve still got it, and later on when we get to writing, I’m hoping that I’ll someday publish a book called *Selected Papers on Fun and Games*. We will not only reprint my first technical article on the Potrzebie System, but also the one that was rejected by *Mad*, and we will see the; people will decide whether they, you know, will be able to decide now whether they made the right decision in rejecting it. So yeah, I like to see things sort of out of the box as well as in the box. [9 - Feeling the need to prove myself](http://webofstories.com/play/17068) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- My parents were asked whether or not they should advance me a grade, because I was doing well in school. And they; in fact I was born in January, which meant that **I was older than most of the kids in my class**, because if I’d been born in December, I would have gone to school a year earlier, so I was one of the oldest in my class, and my parents, you know, a lot of kids at that time were being pushed ahead in school, and one of my friends, you know, graduated from college when he would normally have been entering high school. Well I, but I’m glad that they resisted this, because it gave me this time for all these extra-curricular activities, so I was always into a lot of things. **I mean sports; I was a terrible athlete**. I’m tall, but my left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, so I would only get in the game after we were already behind by 50 points, and, but I was the scorekeeper. I was a terrific scorekeeper, you know, so I became **manager of many of the sports teams** in high school, and also in college. I was manager of the cross-country team, I was manager of the basketball team, I was manager of the baseball team, so **I was a six or seven letter man without being able to do anything athletics**, you know, whatever. But I’m sitting there at the score table during the basketball tournament, and- a basketball game, and like, I’m talking a mile a minute to **keep the other scorekeeper confused**, so that he wouldn’t know, you know, if somebody said, who’s the fouler? And I could tell them, you know, who the foul was on, based on, you know, **who it was most desirable for us to have the foul be on, rather than the person who really committed the foul**, because the guy’s, you know, very mixed up by the way I’m talking. But anyway, I don’t think I won too many games at the scoring table, but I was the person who went along with the team and kept the scorebooks. But all these extra-curricular activities were something that I had time to do, because my parents hadn’t advanced me, and so you know, I could do well in my classes but also participate in lots of other things. Now my, but, you know, so here I am, doing rather well at school, but I’ve still got an **inferiority complex**. I’m still always trying to prove myself. I’m thinking, you know, maybe I’m not getting it well, and in fact, so I was probably taking, you know, studying hard and **getting 100s** on these exams, because I’m **trying to prove that I knew it**. You know; if I was really overconfident, so confident, I wouldn’t have bothered to study. And that was, so that was one of the child’s eyes looking at it. I’m always scared that I’m not going to do well, so I was working hard at schoolwork. The funny thing was that my; when I was being advised what to do for college, well, everybody in my school took a whole bunch of tests, national tests, and one of the tests was vocational, you know, what job are you cut out for? And I remember that that, **according to that test, I should be an architect**, and I should not be a veterinarian. I scored extremely low on veterinarian skills, but for architect, that seemed to be the career path that was recommended to me. But the, and I won scholarships to different colleges, but the people at my high school, the Vice Principal called me in; he said, **“Don, I think you’re going to be a failure in college”**. He said, you know, you’ve done well here in high school, but college is completely different, and you’re just, you know, it’s just going to be too much for you, you’re not going to, you aren’t going to make it. And, well, so **he scared me** again, and when I got to college I kept studying. In fact, just the week before college, the Dean of Students, whoever it was, told us. I went to Case institute of Technology in Cleveland, which was at that time not yet connected with Western Reserve University. So I went to Case, and the Dean of Case says to us, says, it’s a all men’s school, says, “Men, look at, look to the person on your left, and the person on your right. One of you isn’t going to be here next year; **one of you is going to fail.**” So I get to Case, and again I’m studying all the time, working really hard on my classes, and so for that I had to be kind of a machine. I, the calculus book that I had, in high school we — in high school, as I said, our math program wasn’t much, and **I had never heard of calculus until I got to college**. But the calculus book that we had was great, and in the back of the book there were supplementary problems that weren’t, you know, that weren’t assigned by the teacher. The teacher would assign, so this was a famous calculus text by a man named George Thomas, and I mention it especially because it was one of the first books published by Addison-Wesley, and I loved this calculus book so much that later I chose Addison-Wesley to be the publisher of my own book. But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. **I would also do the odd numbered problems**. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and **after that I could just coast in mathematics**, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve. [10 - Why I chose to go to Case Institute of Technology](http://webofstories.com/play/17069) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In high school, as I said, mathematics was just confusing to me. When I got to Case, though, the teachers, the chemistry teacher was, seemed to know chemistry okay, but he didn’t know anything about physics or math. My physics teacher knew physics and chemistry, but my math teacher knew all three subjects, and I had terrific respect for him, because he seemed really smart, and also he was very hard to please. No matter, you know, I could show him what I was doing in calculus, but he would, he never seemed to be impressed, so this was frustrating to me. **I’d never had a teacher that I couldn’t impress**, you know, so I worked even harder at my math. But he had a good sense of humor, and his name was Paul Guenther. And finally, after two years, I was able to impress him a little bit, and so this was good. But I developed an interest in Mathematics, but I have to go back a little bit. I, when I was choosing what college to go to, I had won several scholarships, and one of the scholarships would have been to Valparaiso University in Indiana, associated with the Lutheran Church, and it was, but there I would have been a major in music, and the other scholarship was to Case in Cleveland, which was where I would major in physics, and since my mother’s family is from Cleveland, she knew that Case had very high standards, and very few people that she knew were able even to be admitted to Case, and there was, considered to be one of the hardest schools to do. I’d never heard of MIT, by the way, until some years later, or much less Caltech. But **Case, to me, was a challenge**, where I would really have to work hard and well, Valparaiso, it would be something where I could just do some; music would seem to me much easier. And I decided to go for the challenge, at Case, and I was admitted to; they had a special section for Freshmen, called the Honors Section, where 20 of us were given, were taught each of our classes by the heads of departments. So I really had the, Case’s best, you know, physics teacher, chemistry teacher, math teacher and English teacher. [11 - University life: my basketball management system](http://webofstories.com/play/17070) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I believe it was the first year they had tried this, and I’m not sure how long they continued the experiment, but the teachers, but what they called us the Honor Section, and this just meant that **20 of us just took all our classes together**, while other students would tend to mix. I don’t think the other students all spent Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday the same as, the same hours, like we did. And so the classes that I had, then I think they challenged us a little more too, than they challenged the other students, perhaps. Still, I had time to do you know, to work on the school paper and to, one of the important issues of going to Case at that time was to **join a fraternity**. The, most of the interesting action on campus would be centered around the fraternity system, and so I pledged a fraternity also in my Freshman year, and I guess I can say more about that. But I had mentioned that during the spring of my freshman year is when my *Mad Magazine* article came out, you know, and so that well, that led later to, later on I was **editor of a magazine that we founded at Case**, called *Engineering and Science Review*, which wrote about topics in science, and I wrote an article about Potrzebie System for that publication. I was in the music, I was in the basketball; I was **manager of the basketball team**, at Case. And I’ll say a few words about that, because after I got into computers later on, I combined that with my managing the Basketball team. So I devised a strange formula that I don’t believe in much any more, but anyway, I had it at the time, where you could **compute each basketball player’s real contribution** to the game. Not just the points that he made, the baskets that he made, but really you know, taking everything into account, so for example, if you have possession of the ball in basketball, this is worth something. In fact, when you’re watching a basketball game, if you sort of add one point to the score of the team who has the ball that sort of gives a more fair indication of what the real score is of the game. So **possession of the ball is worth maybe one point**. You can work it out after the game; you can say, really, how many times, when you had possession of the ball did you really turn over, and fumble it, or you know, how many points did you really get during that series? And so you can work out that it may be worth only seven-tenths of a point or something like this. But anyway, possession of the ball is worth something. So if you fumble, then you’ve lost your team one point, or seven-tenths of a point. So that’s a minus something for you. If you steal the ball, if you recover a fumble, you gain; your team gains possession, so you get credit for stealing the ball. If you make a basket, in those days it was only two points, you don’t have the three-point shots in those days, but if you can make a basket you get two points, but **your team also loses possession**, the other team gets possession, so you don’t really; you didn’t really win two points for your team when you made the basket, you made two points, but you have to subtract from that, the fact that you have to get the ball again. So at the end, according to my formula, the sum of all the players’ contributions would be the amount by which our team won or lost. But it would rate, you know, if somebody makes a shot and misses, then sometimes our team gets the rebound, sometimes the other team gets the rebound, so I, you lose a little bit for taking a shot and missing. So **I calculated a huge number of statistics** for every player, and I had a spotter, who would call to me, and I could write it down, every little thing, and after the game I would go and punch cards that recorded all these statistics, and **fed them into a little computer program** that calculated the formula and made a list for every player, what their real contribution to the game was, not just the field goals and all these traditional statistics. So Case’s Coach, Nip Heim, loved this system, and you know, he posted these numbers, and the Case News Service was always good at trying to plant interesting stories in the local paper, so they sent reporters out to, and we showed, you know, told about this formula, and IBM heard about it. So **IBM sent out a cameraman**, a camera crew, to make a film of me spotting a game, you know, and there, our Case team playing basketball of course, but then, how I would punch the cards, you know, and put it into the IBM computer. Before they took the shot of the IBM computer, they planted a great, big IBM sign on the machine, so that nobody could fail to miss it, you know, that I was doing this, and then I’m turning the buttons on the console, and getting the numbers out, and it’s getting printed out on the IBM printer, and then the Coach is looking at it and posting this up. So this was a little movie that I was in, about two or three minutes long. IBM supplies this movie to CBS, and they put it on the Sunday Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and **all my relatives in Florida can see me on TV**. This was very exciting. Also US News and World Report ran a story about it, and so this was my connection between computing and sports, when I was at Case. This was also a clever way for IBM to get their advertisements in there, rather subtly, but it was a fun. That was when I first realized how hard it must be to be a movie star, because I had to walk through these scenes six times everything, you know, **punch those cards over and over again**. So I can see, how could Audrey Hepburn possibly look so beautiful after the sixth take, you know? [12 - University life: the fraternity system](http://webofstories.com/play/17071) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At Case, as I said, **I pledged a fraternity**. That was one of the things that — I’d met a few Case graduates in Milwaukee, or Case students, before, and they said — oh, Don, fraternities are the big thing at; you’ve got to take that very seriously when you go there. Well, anyway, the fraternity system was maybe a little different then than it is now. It certainly had its pros and cons, but it was a big; it was certainly a focus of my life at Case, because after my freshman year I would live at the fraternity, and with all my fraternity brothers. The first thing, though, was something we called Hell Week. Raising. This is, or **hazing**, I mean. I’m sorry, forget that I said raising. And for seven days, all of us pledges, before we could become full-fledged fraternity members, were at the mercy of all the other brothers, who would have their paddles, and also, you know, we were sleep deprived, and basically they were, we were also cleaning the fraternity house, so **that’s when I learned about ammonia and painting things**, and scrubbing walls, and doing other, you know, fixing the roof, and things like this, that we would be doing, but then, but meanwhile they would also, they would play tennis where we were the balls, and they would, you know, swat us, and it hurt; and do other things to make sure that, you know, we knew that they had the power and we were just unimportant now. So **this is illegal now**, and, but it was **my equivalent of going through boot camp**, I guess, which, you know, I never went into military service. And, you know, I matured an awful lot during that week. After that week, and I’d gotten through without the, you know, this time, I had a confidence that I’d never had before, so **it’s hard for me to say that I wouldn’t want my son to go through the same thing**. I don’t think he ever did, but it’s a paradoxical thing, in my estimation. Still, that was part of getting into the fraternity, and I have a picture of myself that they took at the end of it, unshaven, and looking pretty beat, but still knowing that I had come through an ordeal, which was something; it’s a question in my mind, how to really give that education to somebody in a way that is legal, would be legal. Now we’d have people suing. [13 - Meeting my wife Jill](http://webofstories.com/play/17072) --------------------------------------------------------------- At my fraternity, my best friend, who was also in the Honor Section at Case, his name is Bill Davis, he now, by the way, is a mathematics professor at Ohio State, and is very active in internet online education for teaching mathematics, but anyway, **Bill and I were bosom buddies during my freshman year**, and he, and then also in the sophomore year we both pledged Theta Chi fraternity, and so then we also went through Hell Week together and had rooms next to each other in the fraternity house. So **I started to date a girl** at Western Reserve University; her name was Betsy, and her roommate was named Jill, and **Bill was dating Jill**, so I was — now, Betsy was Catholic, and I was Lutheran, and this was something that we thought, well, our families would never be able to understand, but still I thought that Betsy was pretty terrific, but **I was also dating a girl named Becky**, a Jewish girl, whose father owned a department store in Cleveland and **I was dating some nurses too**, you know, there were lots of girls would hang out around the Case area, and, but I was mostly interested in this Betsy, and I was, I decided to, and we’d had double dates with Bill Davis and his girl Jill, and as I said, Betsy and Jill were roommates; Bill and I were roommates. So I was wondering, you know, how I’d ever be able to make more of a hit with Betsy, and I decided I would have **lunch with Jill, to ask her for advice**. And so this was probably the, my sophomore year, the spring of my sophomore year, and, you know, she was such a good listener, and gave such good advice, that **I started dating Jill instead, and well, I’m not sure Bill ever forgave me for that**, but she didn’t really like him, she thought, she said, well, anyway. Well, anyway, Jill is the one that I eventually got pinned to, and engaged to and married to, and **we’ve been married now for 45 years**. And Jill and I started having dates in the library, where we would study together, and, you know, I found that **I enjoyed kisses for the first time**, when they came from her. In high school I was afraid to kiss girls, even when they would stand up. I mean, I was dating a girl in high school who was about four and a half feet tall, I don’t remember her name any more, but I remember that she was real cute, because, **I always liked short girls**, because they seemed to, you know, have a good balance, **they didn’t fall over as easily** as tall ones, and I, being tall, I was, you know, but she was a cheerleader, and she stood on the steps of her house, and with her lips turned up, and I figured I’d got to kiss her, but I’d never done this before, how am I going to do it you know. And so I did, but **I never realized how good it could be until I kissed Jill**, when I was a sophomore. [14 - Bible study at university and a time of personal challenge](http://webofstories.com/play/17073) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m not a real involved with the groovy set, I guess, throughout all my student time, and I remember then **Jill and I** started getting to know each other real well, and we would go to church together on Sundays. She was a Methodist, I, we studied, **we went to Bible Study classes** at her church on Sunday School. I had never gone to Sunday School, because I went to a Lutheran School as a child. We had something about Bible during the week, so why should I do something, why should I do anything more on Sunday? I’ve had plenty of religion during the week. But she had gone to public school and she, her tradition was to go to study the Bible on Sunday mornings, and so I went with her to church, and I learned something about that. In college, our teachers were, I was introduced to lots of **atheists**, and people from lots of different religious experiences and this was something totally different, totally foreign to my previous experience, and I, so **I went through a time of personal challenge**, where I was trying to say, well, what do I really believe? Up to that time I had just, I had just listened to what my teachers said and passed the exams, and did what was expected of me, but I internalized something about what, you know, is there a God, and if so, how do you solve various paradoxes associated with God? And I went through that kind of experience during the Freshman and Sophomore years mostly in college, before I became somewhat comfortable with my, with internalizing what I had been taught as a child. And I’m sure that if I’d come from another background, I would have turned out differently, but, and I personally believe now that God is alive in many ways, but I do believe, you know, **I do believe that God is somehow, mysteriously, involved with our universe**, and that underlies a lot of what I do, and I also know I will never be able to prove it, but I’m thankful that I could never prove it, because if it was proved, I think then I would lose interest in the whole subject; there would be no mystery, and no interest in it. So I, as they say, the growing up in a religious way took place during this time, when I’m meeting my future wife. [15 - Extracurricular activities at Case](http://webofstories.com/play/17074) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I was on **lots of sports teams**, the cross country team, baseball. We would have a chance to; we would have a chance to travel to lots of other places then, with the team. That was fun as well. I worked on, I was the **founding editor** of this magazine, *The Engineering and Science Review*, and then, active in various other things, for example I was **vice president of my fraternity**. There was one story about the newspaper and my fraternity I might as well mention. That we, I was, I would go to downtown Cleveland, where the newspaper was being typeset, and **that’s where I first got experience with Linotype machines**, and the way real printing was done. And I would be the, at first I was the copy editor, so I would check for errors in the text, before they did the final print run, and I noticed that there was a story about one of our Theta Chi fraternity parties, before Christmas, and it said that we had served hot buttered rum, and, well, it dawned on me that we actually weren’t supposed to serve rum at a fraternity party, and still, it was a linotype machine, and you had to pay for every correction that you made, and you had to keep your corrections to one line, if they had to reset several lines — so **I changed it to hot buttered popcorn**. And that worked out okay for the — for the story. Now, so I got more experience in writing, publishing, during that period, and we had the Chair of the English department as my teacher, as freshmen, and we had very good teachers also, you know, in my Western Civilization class, sophomore, junior years, so all the time I was writing. I was writing stories for, I was, you know, writing term papers, but I was also writing for campus publications. And I came to believe that really **my education boiled down to 50% mathematics, 50% English**; 50%, you know, writing skills, and somehow combining those two things, for the rest of my life is what everything else was somehow a mixture of those two things. I was in so many extra-curricular activities in fact, that Case has something called the Honor Key, which is based on points. You get so many points for being in the band, so many points for being in a fraternity, not very many for that, but certainly for the newspaper and for singing in the choir, chorus, and participating in other campus things, and **if you get a certain number of points then you win the Honor Key**, and at, you know, at Graduation Day they’ll mention the four or five students who have won the Case Honor Key. Well, it turned out I had enough points to win the Honor Key, but after three years, and, you know, so I think I had more points, **more Honor Points than anybody else had had in the history of Case**, so again I was, you know, a machine, saying, “Oh? There are points for this? Okay, I’d better do this.” And I signed up for these things. So I was involved with lots of extra-curricular stuff. I also had a chance to do a little bit of writing music. I wrote a five-minute musical comedy for our fraternity to perform at the whatever they call it, the oh, I forget what it was; it was an annual thing, where each fraternity would put on some kind of a skit. Varsity Day, or something, I can’t remember what we called it. And we would go to a theatre in downtown Cleveland and perform for whoever wanted to listen in. I **wrote this five-minute musical comedy called “Nebbish Land”**, based on nebbishes, you know, these were popular in the Greeting Card Industry at the time. And that I still have the score for, so maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll put some of the music for that in my book on fun and games. [16 - Taking graduate classes at Case](http://webofstories.com/play/17075) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- At Case I put a lot of time into stuff out of class, but in class, I found a really clever way to, right now, let me brag this way to say, to **avoid having to study too hard**, for my classes. In the first place, I noticed though, that when I was a sophomore, my grades started to go down, in the first part of my sophomore year. And I ascribed it to too much ping-pong playing and playing cards too much in the dorm, and so; no, I’m sorry; this was the **second half of my freshman year. I started having a little problem with my grades**, and so I had to give up ping-pong. But starting in my sophomore — junior year, I found out that you could take graduate courses at Case, and they were **easier than the undergraduate courses**. The reason is that Case had really strict admissions requirements for undergrads, but they were fairly loose about admitting graduate students. I think they wanted to build up, you know, admit graduate students, so when you had graduate students, in a class, they usually didn’t know as much as the undergrads did, so if you would take a graduate course, you didn’t have as much competition, you know, and the teacher would recycle stuff, and all this. So I started taking graduate classes, and you know, and all these hotshot undergrads would be taking the other classes. And as a result, I had accumulated also, by the time I was a senior, I had accumulated lots and lots of graduate credits. Now, as a result then, Case did, on Graduation Day, Case did **an unprecedented thing that had never been done before, they awarded me a Master’s Degree**, simultaneously with my Bachelor’s Degree. And this, the faculty had gotten together and made a, and voted unanimously that this should happen, and I remember, you know, that was another thing that got into the newspapers at the time, that they were awarding a Master’s Degree at the same time as a Bachelor’s Degree. So, but the reason was that I had taken these graduate courses because they were easier. I didn’t, **I don’t know if I’ve ever told anybody else this** before today, but that was one of the reasons I could do so many other things. [17 - Physics, welding, astronomy and mathematics](http://webofstories.com/play/17076) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I started in physics, and I continued in physics; as I said, I liked my math teacher very much, but I was a physics major, and in sophomore year I had another very good physics professor, and started learning **quantum mechanics**, and had classes in astronomy, and I also had a class called, I don’t know what it was called, but it was a laboratory class. All **physics majors were required to know how to do things like welding**. Now, I was always very **bad at lab work**, in chemistry lab, I was always the last to finish experiments, and I would break the beakers and get chemicals on my hands and burn them and things like this, and start fires, things; it was bad, but when I got into this welding, this class where I’m supposed to do **welding, it was just dreadful**. I mean I couldn’t see, you know, I wear rather heavy glasses, and we had to wear goggles while we were welding, but the goggles wouldn’t fit over my glasses, so I couldn’t, you know, so I couldn’t wear my glasses and my goggles at the same time. So I’m sitting there with these goggles that I can’t see very well out of, and I’ve got this electrical thing, which is thousands and thousands of volts, where I’m supposed to be welding material, but the table is way lower than I am; I’m kind of tall, and so I, and so here I’m holding this thing way out of my range, and I’m supposed to, you know, I’m supposed to get, solder things together, or whatever you call the stuff, and when I was supposed to put, to get one thing attached to another, the teacher would, you know, would pick it up and it would fall apart, by its own weight, so I was **failing in welding class**. And it was **terrifying** too, you see, with all this electrical juice going on in there, and me not being able to... My astronomy class, I found out that it was very frustrating. I could pass all the exams, in fact I got a 100 on every exam in **my astronomy class, but secretly I hated the subject**, and I decided that I would continue the classes **as self-discipline**, because I didn’t want the teacher to know that I hated the class. And I figured, you know, I’m not going to be, I have to learn how to do stuff that I don’t enjoy as well as stuff that I enjoy. So I studied very carefully for the exams in astronomy, but I really — and why didn’t I like it? I’m trying, I believe it’s just because I was just, I couldn’t imagine how, they were so different from mathematics, in astronomy you would never be able to go to the sun and really know what it was like there. You always had secondary information. If I would be an astronomer, I would never, I would, I would have to die before I would know anything, which was really true, because it’s **all based on speculation**. It’s all based on our best guesses about the way the universe is, and nothing that you can really experience yourself, or prove correct. In physics, the same way, nature is beyond our grasp, and you don’t know. But mathematics was different. **Mathematics had this certainty about it** that, where you could finish a problem, and you could say, you know, I know I’ve got the answer. And so I like that. **It was easy**. It’s much easier; you know, I have to admire the people who, the scientists who spend their life and never know whether they’ve solved the problem or not, they just get supporting evidence for or against it, but to me, anyway, mathematics got more and more appealing, for the reason that it gave me some certainty; **just the opposite of the reason why religion was appealing**, because it didn’t have certainty, I mean I would feel unhappy of the life where I had nothing certain, and life where I had everything certain. In either extreme, life, it’s hard for me. [18 - My math teacher at Case and a difficult problem](http://webofstories.com/play/17077) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I gravitated toward mathematics. And there was another reason. Our mathematics teacher was very, was a very eccentric guy, and also very hard, my **second year mathematics teacher**, also hard to please, and he had quite a reputation at Case, because, **a couple of years earlier, he had flunked the entire class**. He decided that none of them was learning anything; he gave F to everybody in the course, so Louis Green was a legend at Case. And I was taking his class, as a sophomore, called “Basic Mathematics”, which he had written the textbook for himself. And that was a course where you, stuff like, lot, things that are different from the continuous things that physicists study. And there must, you know, there must be something in the way I grew up that made **integer numbers more appealing to me**. I, I mean it’s associated with computing, as everyone knows now. Of course **computers didn’t exist**, or hardly existed in those days. I’ll speak more about my first view of a computer later, but the, here we are, in Louis Green’s “Basic Mathematics” class, and I’m getting to a different kind of mathematics than calculus, and one day he gave a problem to the class. He said, “Here’s a problem that I don’t think — **if anybody solves this problem, I’ll give you an automatic A in the class**”. And the problem, now, it turns out, well, I can state the problem, he said, if you, putting parentheses around into a mathematical formula, if you have a formula with five variables, A, B, C, D, E. **How many ways can you put parentheses into that formula** so that you are combining two things at a time? So you could say, A, you could say, parenthesize AB, and then parenthesize C, and then D or E, or you could start with B and C and combine that with A, and so different ways to do this. So if you start out with *n* of these variables, and you put, you combine with parentheses, what, how many ways are there to do it? And this, by the way, is something very dear to the hearts of computer scientists now, because we call it **the number of binary trees with *n* leaves**. But Louis Green gave us, as a problem, as a challenge, could we determine this number? And if anybody could, he said he’d give an A to them. Well. I don’t know to this day whether he knew the answer to the problem or not, but I have found out subsequently that **the answer was published in the 18th century**, and, and had a long history. And so these numbers are so famous now that one of my friends, Richard Stanley at MIT, has found **128 different interpretations** of these numbers, parentheses is just one of these 128 ways. And he’s collected that many ways. In fact I had the honor of discovering number 128 last year, when I was with him in Sweden, but that’s; anyway. My sophomore year, Louis gives us this problem, and we all knew Louis’s reputation, so we figured, **why work on the problem? He’ll never give out a problem that we could actually solve**, why should we, you know, why should we waste time on this silly thing? But it turned out that I was on the football, I was in the band, actually, not the football team, and **our band was going to play in Detroit**, at the football game, on Saturday, but **I missed the bus. I got up too late**, so I was, so I found out the bus had just left for Detroit, and I had a whole, and I had figured I’d spend all, you know, a wasted day, all day in Detroit. So I figured, okay, I’ll work on Louis, I’ll spend this day thinking about Louis Green’s impossible problem. And **I got lucky, and figured, and found the answer to it**, and so I wrote it up on two sheets of paper, and turned it in on Monday morning, and he looked it over, and on Tuesday, he said, **“Okay, you get an A in this class.”** So I’m still a physics major, but I took his math class, and so I cut class the rest of the quarter, and he lived up to his agreement, and I got an A on my, on the score. Well, I felt a little guilty afterwards, having cut class, so I served as his grader for his course the following year. But that, what was I going to say? So, but **that summer I switched into mathematics as a major**, because of my experience with the welding in physics, and because I found that mathematics was something that I would be able to actually prove, prove correctness, and that, this appealed to me. Still, I didn’t study mathematics that much, because I already had the A, and an A was what I was looking for in my college grades. [19 - My interest in graphs and my first experience of a computer](http://webofstories.com/play/17078) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How did I get into computers? I had a scholarship to Case, but it was, it didn’t cover my whole tuition; it just covered part of the tuition, and so I took a part time job. My parents had no money, and I took **a part time job working in the Statistics Department**. Taking, and one of the things I would do, would run a card sorter, an IBM card sorting machine, which was kind of a fascinating thing. You put the; take these punched cards, and you put them in the thing, and it distributes into different pockets, and then you pull them out in certain orders, and afterwards look at the results, and you draw graphs. And so I was drawing graphs for the Statistics Department. I guess I should say something more about graphs, while it flashes into my mind. In high school, I had taken time, one summer, working with; I was **fascinated by this idea of graphs** in mathematics, where you have, you know, as a function, as variable X varies, you have Y as a function of X, then you draw the position that’s Y units above the axis, and it makes a picture. And since I like visual things, I was fascinated by the idea that I might be able to take, start with the picture that I wanted to do, and find the equation that would, when you graph the equation, you would get that picture. And so I played around with graphs. I spent one summer in high school, I had drawn hundreds and hundreds of graphs, where I would take, where I would take an equation like the square root of X? + 5, 5x, minus something else, and I would, and then I would draw the graph. And I had, and **my dad had a little calculating machine**, which was a, where I, which could calculate square roots. It actually would print it out. He was an accountant, so it would also print it out on tape, that I could run this machine and it would do the multiplying and stuff for me, and then I would have this function of, and then I would say, instead of X? + 5x, I would maybe change it to X? plus 4x, and draw that graph too, until I would learn how different graphs looked. I didn’t have calculus, I didn’t know calculus in high school, but I did know how to graph an equation, and that fascinated me, so I had played, I worked so hard on this, in fact, on this orange graph paper that I had, **I started to get headaches**, it was not easy on the eyes, and I think I started wearing heavier glasses at this time, because I worked on the graphs, but this had given me some experience with graphs, and liked, I liked that kind of mathematics, even when I was in high school. So now, I got my first, I got my first part time job at Case; I’m supposed to draw graphs for the statisticians. So that’s fine, and downstairs from the sorting machine was a new computer, an electronic brain, as they called it, in those days, and it was the first, it was called the IBM Model 650. This was the, historically, **the first computer that was mass-produced**; there were more than 1,000 of them. Before that, computers had; no computer had been made more than a few dozen at the most. And this computer arrived, about midway in my Freshman year at Case, and it was sitting in a room downstairs from the Statistics laboratory, where I was working. So I could peer through the window at this computer, and with its flashing lights it looked rather exciting. And one day a guy saw me looking through the window, and he said, **he invited me to come in, and he explained to me how the machine worked**, and so it was quite fascinating to me that it could do things much different than this mechanical calculating machine that my dad had shown me. So I took a look at **the operating manuals for the machine**, and pretty soon I, he allowed me to punch cards that would go into that machine, as what; you know, I knew how to run a sorter, but now I could actually punch a card that would make a computer program. And I, and so I began to learn something about the inside of this machine. [20 - Learning how to program on the IBM 650 (Part 1)](http://webofstories.com/play/17079) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I read the manuals that came from IBM, and it had; the manuals had example programs in there, and I thought of better ways to write those programs. I thought of, you know, well, okay, this program works, but if you did it this way, it would be even better. And so that’s given me some confidence that maybe I had a talent for programming. Now, **if the manual hadn’t had these bad examples in it, I probably would not have gotten interested in programming**, because I wouldn’t have this confidence, and I would have been scared and say, oh, I would never think of this.But the fact is, the manuals were pretty stupid, and that’s what gave me the confidence that I should think a little more abou
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