Prof Randy Pausch

I came to know about Prof Randy Pausch a few months back. He was a professor of Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a pioneer of Virtual Reality, human -computer interaction researcher, co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center. He passed away in July 2008 after battling with pancreatitis cancer.
Prof Randy Pausch gave a lecture at CMU which made him a celebrity. CMU organizes a series of lectures titled the Last Lecture where a professor is hypothetically given the scenario that he would soon die and that was his last lecture. For Prof Randy, he was actually dying. He was diagnosed with pancreatitis cancer a few months back and he had just a couple of months left in his life. A normal human being would have been so depressed and mentally weak after coming to know that death is looming large on him. Randy was not a normal human being; he was an extra-ordinary person. His spirit was extra-ordinary.

Randy chose a topic titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams for that lecture at CMU. There are three parts in that speech:

1. How Randy could achieve his childhood dreams?
   
2. How he helped others (students) in achieving their childhood dreams
   
3. Lessons learned
   

Under the second part, I came to know about the Project Alice. It teaches young kids how to do computer programming through a 3D gaming interface. He said that kids would be playing a game; but learning computer programming at the same time. He said that his legacy would live in that project after he is gone from this world.

The complete video is available at the following site:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

At the end of the lecture, he said there are two head-fakes in the entire lecture:

1. There is nothing like achieving childhood dreams. He said that he believed in karma. If you live well, dreams would come to you automatically.
2. Secondly, he didn't give the lecture to the 500 people sitting in the CMU hall; but was actually giving the lecture for his three kids (6, 4 and 2 year old).

I have just finished watching that. I learned lot of good things about life from this lecture. There is a book also named The Last Lecture now on this lecture.

He gave another lecture at University of Virginia titled Time Management. This one is important for all of us. How do we manage our time correctly?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758#

I'll write about the Time Management lecture some other day. There are two more videos that I watched.

• On March 13th 2008, Prof Andy Pausch gave a testimony before US Congress http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iP7xr6ig-s
  
• Andy Pausch on Oprah Winfrey show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ya9BXClRw
  

May his soul rest in peace.