Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth—"A Conjecture That Had To Be True" (2017)

Donald Knuth shares the story of a combinatorial geometry problem and the surprising formula that described its solutions.

Donald Knuth's 23rd Annual Christmas Tree Lecture: A Conjecture That Had To Be True Speaker: Donald Knuth 2017 A few months ago, the speaker did some extensive calculations relating to a curious problem in combinatorial geometry; and the resulting numbers satisfied an amazing formula. Although this formula was known to be true only in the five or six smallest cases of the problem, it was impossible to imagine a decent world in which the formula would not hold universally. View the lecture and learn about the interesting sequel. About the Speaker: Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming and has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process he also popularized the asymptotic notation. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.