In the Communications of the ACM this month there is an interview with Donald Knuth, 'premier artist' of computer science, professor emeritus at Stanford. Many of us were inspired by him and his portrayal of very hard problems as art. His delightfully archaic home page. On his 70th. It fits in well with today's design directions. When I left the Pentagon I was given a set of his books as a parting gift. I can't point directly to the ACM article, but I can point to its origin at the Computer Science Museum site. Inspirational especially for those that are thinking about math and science careers. Also, the Communications of the ACM, the premier computer science mag and now 50 years old, has done a nice job of making its articles more accessible to the practitioner. Like all technical magazines, as a field expands in depth and breadth, even professionals in the field cannot spend the time to understand articles outside their sub-specialties. We do hunger for new frontiers, accurately explained and abstracted. Now I wish I could link to ACM articles from my blog, to my knowledge I cannot. I do understand the economic issues involved with publishing an expensive magazine.
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