Randy Pausch, A Great Man

Every once in a while, someone comes along that really makes a difference; Randy Pausch is one of them.

A lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, Randy has gained fame from his 2 lectures “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams“, and “Time Management“. He’s also dying of pancreatic cancer.

I feel quite a fraud writing this, because I’ve only really been made aware of Randy’s story and his work in the past few weeks.

That said, as soon as I saw Childhood Dreams, I immediately told the world, found Time Management, I read his website, and I check his news and updates page daily, to see how he’s doing.

If you do anything today, look at his lectures. It’s easy to see why he is so incredibly popular, watching him talk is an experience in itself. He has an incredibly infectious lust for life, and he is so enthusiastic about everything he does.

After checking him out on the web, I thought damn (not to mention other, more angry words) – why the hell didn’t I know about this guy several years ago? What really crushes me is that he’s had a huge effect on me, watching his lectures, and reading his site, and I’ll never get to meet him. As you would expect, he’s devoting his time to his family now.

It’s safe to say Randy gets about a bit. He’s written a plethora of books, he helped create ALICE – (a “head fake”, which teaches kids how to program, but sneaks education in when they aren’t looking), has taught loads of lectures and has touched so many lives. From his bio:

“Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he was the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. Dr. Pausch received his bachelors in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, is the director of the Alice (www.alice.org) software project, and has been in zero-gravity.”

I think I might email him to brighten his day a bit, even if he doesn’t reply. If only I had his phone number! (I wonder if the Virginia residential phonebook is available online, hmmm…)

Last, but not least, I say this about few people: If there were more people like Randy Pausch, the world would be a better place, and I can safely say after seeing hours of his lectures and reading pages of literature about him, short of meeting him (which I may never get to do), he is now one of my childhood idols, and I aspire to be like him one day.

Graham

It’s hard to get a broad look at the effect Randy Pausch has on the world, check out his website for more info.