The most important algorithm

I sincerely recommend the video lecture by A. Stepanov (the person who created the STL): “about the history of the algorithm for finding the greatest common divider”, this popular lecture turned out to be infinitely interesting; in the context of history from ancient times from Pythagoras to the present day to Knut.


You can see here:
part 1
video.yandex.ru/users/ya-events/view/129
part 2
video.yandex.ru/users/ya-events/view/128

Slides
www.stepanovpapers.com/gcd.pdf (eng)
www.stepanovpapers.com/gcd_ru.pdf (rus) curves

Lecture in the best quality on the tracker with slides:
rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3139315
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A few words about Alexander, this man worked at SGI, later AT & T as vice president and chief architect of AT & T Laboratories since 2000 at Compaq and HP, as vice president and main scientist, he now works at Adobe.
But the programmer must be judged not by the positions he occupied, but by the results of his work, and the result of his work are four hundred algorithms that everyone uses to this day.

UPD Knight Riddle:
Not a bike.
Once Knut decided to optimize his kitchen, he laid out all the things he needed, and began to record the number of approaches to things, measured the distance and finally wrote a program that optimized the arrangement of things in the kitchen. What do you think what thing was in his center of the kitchen?
The comment already has the correct answer.