[kwantam]

One of the fun things about the median-of-medians algorithm is its completely star-studded author list.

Manuel Blum - Turing award winner in 1995

Robert Floyd - Turing award winner in 1978

Ron Rivest - Turing award winner in 2002

Bob Tarjan - Turing award winner in 1986 (oh and also the inaugural Nevanlinna prizewinner in 1982)

Vaughan Pratt - oh no, the only non-Turing award winner in the list. Oh right but he's emeritus faculty at Stanford, directed the SUN project before it became Sun Microsystems, was instrumental in Sun's early days (director of research and designer of the Sun logo!), and is responsible for all kinds of other awesome stuff (near and dear to me: Pratt certificates of primality).

Four independent Turing awards! SPARCstations! This paper has it all.

[jiggawatts]

Job interview question for an entry-level front end developer: "Reproduce the work of four Turing award winners in the next thirty minutes. You have a dirty whiteboard and a dry pen. Your time begins... now."

[ted_dunning]

And if you really want to impress, you reach into your pack and pull out the pens you carry just in case you run into dry pens at a critical moment.

[jiggawatts]

I have actually done this. I bought myself a pack of premium pens at an art store and kept them in my laptop bag for customer site visits. They were designed for writing on glass but also worked great on whiteboards. It’s fun when your diagrams just look better than anyone else’s. It’s like a report document with good typography. It can be filled with made up BS but it still impresses subconsciously.

[Munksgaard]

Here's a direct link for anyone who, like me, would be interested in reading the original article: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/BFPRT73.pdf

That's an impressive list of authors, for sure.

[praptak]

Some other awesome stuff by Pratt:

Pratt parsing (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066465), the "P" in the KMP algorithm.