I went to one of Don Knuth’s computer science “musings” lectures today. I thought that it was a shame that I’ve been on the same campus as this living legend but I’ve never heard him speak. The topic of his ninety minute talk was a newly discovered isomorphism between integer partitions and set partitions. I was able to follow the first half of the lecture since I had just taken applied group theory last quarter, but it became rather abstract towards the end. The one take away point was that there exists a relationship between nesting and crossing across a partition and it’s dual that isn’t yet well understood but apparently constitutes a fundamental result. Like I said, it got abstract rather quickly.
But damn, that guy Knuth is smart. He’s really old and has the same cranial structure as Yoda, but he can still think circles around most of the people in the audience. I’ve never encountered someone so old who was still completely with it. He must have been something in his younger years.
Knuth said he was still hard at work on volume four, but that parts of it should be available in bookstores soon (volume four is being published in quarterly “episodes” it would seem). I really need to get myself a copy of his codices. I’m hoping to run across them at a flea market sometime and pick them up on the cheap.
Of course if you don’t know what books I’m talking about you won’t have understood the significance of any of this, so never you mind.
