How to Watch Donald Knuth’s Christmas Lectures, the Legendary Stanford Computer Science Guru

Looking to develop your computer science knowledge during the holiday downtime? Here is how to watch some of Donald Knuth’s legendary Christmas lectures.

If the name doesn’t immediately ring a bell for you it doesn’t mean you don’t know him or his work, as Knuth is a computer science guru whose impact can hardly be overstated.

More than 60 years ago, Donald Knuth wrote The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most influential tech books in the world.

For the past three decades, he has also guided Stanford students with what are considered legendary lectures, as Knuth rarely makes public appearances.

Now, Stanford has generously uploaded most of Knuth’s Christmas lectures, as well as the so-called “‘Aha’ Sessions” courses in mathematical problem-solving they offered a few years back. 

All in all, there are a few dozens of Donald Knuth’s lectures you can watch for free, starting with courses he held back in 1982 but are still incredibly valuable today, from code breaking to hardware fault detection.

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Here are some links to all of the new ones freely available now:

The full Donald Knuth Christmas Lectures playlist

Donald Knuth’s TeX for beginners from 1981

Donald Knuth’s Advanced TeXarcana from 1981

Donald Knuth’s Stanford Lecture: The Internal Details of TeX82 in 12 sessions

Donald Knuth’s ‘Aha’ Sessions – 22 videos

Enjoy!