[dbfclark]

I'm his grandson, not his colleague, so far be it from me to say he was a great man, but he was a great grandfather and an inspiration. He taught me an enormous amount, from logic to just how hard it can be to get people to adopt new technologies -- he eschewed word processing, writing every document directly in PostScript even up to the present -- but most importantly he showed me how important it is to love what you do, and for that I owe him a ton of my happiness and career.

Fare you the hell well, Gramps.

[bliti]

Sorry for your loss. Could you share some stories about him?

[dbfclark]

Everyone has stories, most better than me. I find my most vivid memory of experiencing him as an adult was that every time you spoke with him he'd have had some completely flabbergasting new life experience you'd never imagined. He was a guest on something like the second trip to China after Nixon, took seminars with Oppenheimer at Berkeley (he tended to call him Oppy), and may have been invited to help create an early ATM. The list goes on and on.

One Christmas, we were talking about how difficult it is to assess the accuracy of an algorithm when you only get a few tries because running it is expensive; he promptly told us about his experience with this problem, which he encountered driving plutonium nuggets across Richland, Washington. After the video from the ACM conference on personal workstations got published here, I learned for the first time he'd been fired from MIT three times for insubordination, and I never got a chance to ask him what the story there was...

Oh! And he actually made a physical turing machine good enough to do fairly sophisticated computations on. It ended up in my father's intro CS class at Princeton for many years.

And HN will of course appreciate one of his favorite one-liners:

Did you know that 49 is the lowest number that can be expressed as the square of 7 in only one way?

[ohjeez]

I am so envious of your experience.

My grandfather had his own achievements (including saving about 1,000 people from Hitler's concentration camps by arranging for transport out of Germany). But it sounds like your grandfather was much more fun to talk to.

[dbfclark]

He'd talk about computers for fun, at least. But try to convince him that the internet actually worked and you'd have a whole evening's conversation on your hands...

[bliti]

I'm still on the fence, too. The internet is still too young of an experiment. We are now at a stage where machines themselves are going online. I'm sure he would have loved seeing the next 24 Yeats unravel.

[kevinefclark]

The Turing machine usually gets abbreviated TOTMTEWP: The Only Turing Machine That Ever Was, Probably.

I'd forgotten the 49 one liner. Love that joke.

[pd1]

I don't get the 49 joke, explain please?

[dbfclark]

It's a reference to a story about Ramanujan, who once (remarkably) told G. H. Hardy that 1729 wasn't a boring number because it was the smallest number that could be expressed as the sum of two cubes in more than one way. Sometimes trivial but always erudite in the best way, that was Wes.

[Jtsummers]

It's like telling your only grandson he's your favorite grandson. 49 is the lowest and only number that can be expressed as the square of 7. But the phrasing makes you think there's a second (or more) number after it.

[bliti]

Wonderful! Thank you for sharing. :)