Donald Knut: I sat in the back row and hunted jokes, and the teachers resigned and didn't often beat on the ass (1,2,3,7 / 97)

Donald Knut talks about mom and dad, recalls how he learned to read, like shkodil at school. He reveals the first writing experience and hints at Easter eggs with an erotic star in his books.

Family history

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My ancestors in 1840 lived in Germany, and by 1870 - in America. The whips on the father’s side were very diverse. My great-grandfather was originally from Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), quite close to the border with Denmark, and he was the last to move.

00:42 During the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in the 1860s, if I am not mistaken, in 1864, he declined to serve in the army, because did not want to fight against Prussia. He decided to come to America, and one night he knocked on the window, told his parents “don’t remember a lot” and ended up in Illinois. And then he worked, he studied at the blacksmith at that time. He met his wife in America. Her family had also emigrated from Hannover, Germany, and they lived in Indiana, all near Chicago. Thus, this part of the family is from different places of Germany.

01:48 My mother's ancestors emigrated in the 1840s, they were farmers in the lands of Lower Saxony (Germany), in the small town of Bad Essen. Her parents came and became farmers in Ohio, near Cleveland. So my father was born in Chicago, and my mother in Cleveland. Father first began teaching in Cleveland, and there they met. Then he was called to Milwaukee, and although it was quite far from their families, he accepted the offer to become a teacher there.

My mother

I have to talk about my mom, which is a very important part of my life. She was not typical for that time, because she had a good job. My parents were the first in the whole history of our family to have an education. My father went to teach at a college in Chicago, and my mother spent a year or two studying for legal affairs. And during World War II, she got a job from one person in Milwaukee, who owned and managed several skyscrapers, and she became his personal secretary, and later - a representative of these organizations who owned property.

By the time of his death, she was already doing quite well, and she was asked to become the manager of one of the buildings. So she was all her life engaged in real estate, large commercial facilities in the suburbs of Milwaukee. However, she started doing it when I was five or six years old, but still continued to manage the household.

01:55 My grandfather was a blacksmith, my great-grandfathers on both sides were engaged in construction and repair. There was no family tradition to get an education, and I was certainly the first to graduate. Part of this is the story of all of America, that more and more people go to college, but when I was in high school, about 7 or 8 percent of my classmates went to college. And it was considered decent for those times.

Introduction to reading and school

It all started in Milwaukee, WI. I was born in 1938. I don’t remember anything from the first years of my life, but I know a little of the records left by my parents, which were unusual in their own way as far as I was introduced to reading. All their friends thought that they should not do this, that I would be bored at school if they read me a lot. But I was the youngest bookworm in the Milwaukee public library. And this is the earliest thing I know about my past, since they have kept a clipping from the newspaper. It seems that I was about two and a half years old, and I became a “bookworm” in the Milwaukee library.

00:59 My memories start from the time when I went to a small school at our church. My father was a teacher there. A teacher in a Lutheran school - it was the work of his life. About their salaries and talk is not worth it, it seems, something about 10-15 dollars per month. But it was a very emotional, caring community. By and large we didn’t care what happens there in the world, we felt happiness and stability. It was a good place for a child.

01:51 And when I was in the first class, my dad was a teacher in the second, but then he transferred, so when I was in the second, he taught in the fourth. When I got to the fourth, he was already in the sixth. Finally, when I grew up to the sixth grade, he began to teach high school students, so, fortunately, I never had a father as a teacher. There were about 20-25 students in this school and our teachers were not really that good in exact sciences or math, but they were very good in English. For example, in the seventh grade, I remember, some of us remained after lessons to study the patterns of the sentence: well, you know, take a sentence and emphasize the subject and predicate, determine the type of sentence. And we learned English well, because our teacher inspired us. Because of this, in high school, in English classes, where teachers did not give much on this topic, I was sometimes bored - I already knew all this.

And so, the school I went to was Lutheran. People who work in such schools, they are like my father, treat the business as their mission, as a vocation to be a good teacher. That is, we were surrounded by people who actually treated us with interest, and not as work, which simply is. Learning was their way to make the world a better place.

04:14 Some people think that ecclesiastical schools teach intolerance, that you should only value people in your circle, etc. But our case was completely different. Yes, it was a good experience. Although, nevertheless, we had one teacher who had prejudices against black people, but he ... he stood out, and we did not pay attention to him. Therefore, I think it was a good place to grow up, although nothing extraordinary in terms of special knowledge or the like.

05:12 I think I was the smartest guy. I often sat in the back desks and hunted jokes, and the teachers, not very approving of it, somehow resigned themselves and did not often beat me on the ass. We had good music for singing at school, we also had a lot of freedom: I remember that our group of four or five friends in the fifth and sixth grades was engaged in various small projects. For example, we were able to get a tape recorder - as it was in the 1940s - and tried to write scripts for fictional radio programs, pretending to be on the radio, doing skits and recording them. My friend and I began to publish a wall newspaper called Newsweak. Yes, of course, it was WEAK who wrote (approx .: week - week, weak - weak).

In this newspaper, we talked about what was happening in school, stuffed it with “bearded” jokes that we met in books, kept a page of riddles and stuff like that. This was my first writing experience. As I have already said, English was at a high level in school, so I had a lot of practice in terms of languages, I had the opportunity to do something creative, like these pranks.

About my sense of humor

Skeptical, cynical, I prefer something satirical. Therefore, I liked Mad Magazine : it was a crazy satire on the "sacred cows" of modernity. When my friends and I discovered it in high school, we eagerly swallowed every page, and were crazy about Mad. Before us, as I said, we had bearded jokes, but my friend and I also claimed sarcasty and frivolity.



00:44 I like to laugh, in the newspaper we always left columns for jokes, and in our senior class album there were also unexpected jokes.



01:14 And it didn’t go away with age: you know, there are also a lot of simple jokes in the indexes to my books that people may not have discovered yet. But one day they will ask me why I have references to Beau Derek in The TeXbook? But it turns out that on all these pages I used the number 10 ( “Ten” - a 1979 film, a romantic comedy with Bo Derek in the lead role). You see, I always had this ridiculous feature - I do not look at everything too seriously.

Read more

" Donald Knut:" My advice to the young "(93/97) and" Feeling the need to assert themselves "(9/97)

To be continued ...

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Translation: Sergey Danshin
Publication support is the Edison company, which develops CAD systems for electrical power systems , as well as assists the research institute with the implementation of a software module containing a mathematical neural network algorithm for image recognition .