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An Anonymous Coward writes:

For a quarter of a century, Stanford’s great computer science professor emeritus has been delivering a special “Christmas Tree” lecture each December. Now approaching his 82nd birthday, Donald Knuth emerged again on Dec. 5 for the 25th annual installment — and took the time to remind his audience that he’s also still diligently writing the book he’s been working on for the last 57 years.

[...] But for this year’s lecture, Knuth did something special. He showed the audience how, throughout the last half of a century, he’s whimsically worked the digits of pi into various exercises in his book — again, and again, and again. Knuth tells the audience that he’s searched the entire text of his own book, The Art of Computer Programming, using the Linux tool egrep, and he’s found a whopping 1,700 occurrences of the word pi, “which mean pi occurs maybe twice every five pages in the book so far.” He feels that using pi in his examples assures readers that the algorithms really will work, even on an arbitrarily chosen cluster of digits.

But before long his talk had turned into a kind of intellectual funhouse, sharing other pi-related miscellanies that are often surprising — and occasionally even mind-boggling.

https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2019-christmas-tree-lecture-explores-pi-in-the-art-of-computer-programming/ [thenewstack.io]

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