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

kragen/knuth-interview-2006

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2022-10-06 00:00:11

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.

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.