Five minutes ago I opened my copy of NJAS's and FJ MacWilliams's 1977 book The Theory of Error Correcting Codes to read what it had to say about Golay codes. It had been sitting undisturbed in my home office for, oh, I don't know, maybe 12 years. Probably longer.
Maybe twenty years.
Out dropped a printout of email from Don Knuth, dated 17 May 1987 that I had thought I had lost forever. Here's the story behind it.
About 20 years ago, I was about to be kicked out of the Stanford Computer Science department's PhD program for failing to pass the comprehensive exams. There were six parts to the exam. You had to pass all of them to pass the exam. I'd failed three times already, failing the "Systems" part each time. If I failed the exam again, they would kick me out of the program.
It was suggested that I meet with Don Knuth to discuss the situation. I had never met him before.
I went into his office and he told me a story about hating astronomy as an undergraduate. He failed his first astronomy exam. So he decided he would be the best astronomy student that there ever was. He forced himself to learn stupid things that he detested.
He became the world's greatest astronomy student. He passed all his Astronomy examinations after that, with the highest grades. Despite that, he never had an interest in the subject again (I doubted that, even then).
That was it. The meeting was over. I left his office. I considered the meeting to have been a big failure, although it was interesting to meet Knuth. I took the exam maybe one month later.
I passed the exam miraculously and then got this email from Knuth (click it to read it)
Added later: It's scary to think where I might have ended up had I not passed this exam. The way technology and computer science have gone, I'd probably be sitting in some lonely office, typing obscure blog entries for a vanishingly small readership—oh, uh, wait...
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