Knuth Interview on NPR

NPR's Morning Edition had a quick interview with Donald Knuth on the radio this morning. I (fortunately?) was running late, so I caught it on my commute.

He spoke of striving for perfection and beauty in software, which makes him my hero. :)

In Knuth's quest for perfection he mails out checks for $2.56 (100000000 cents in binary) to the first people who spot errors in his books. They even mentioned his typesetting package, TeX, which he wrote to typeset his works, and how it achieves nearly flawless presentation. It's long been the defacto standard for typesetting in the mathematics community.

He's still writing volumes of his The Art of Computer Programming series of books. I may need to try to pick up the completed volumes for my "leisure reading".