The New York Times has a nice article on Don Knuth entitled The Yoda of Silicon Valley that talks briefly about his life and contributions to Computer Science. It’s been all over Internet but if you haven’t had a chance to read it, you really should. It’s a look at one of the super stars in our field.
Speaking of Knuth, I watched his 24th annual Christmas Lecture the other day and it’s also well worth spending some time on. It’s about “Dancing Links,” a data structuring idea for backtracking that turns out to be useful in a wide variety of combinatorial problems. In the talk, Knuth mentions that a draft of the section of AOCP that deals with Dancing Links is available but not linked. Since the talk, he has supplied a link so you can get it from his Website if you’re interested in reading some more.