[nerdy]

He's a great speaker too, he'll discuss topics I am not at all familiar with but the context he wraps them in makes them easy to intuit. He also has a very intense passion for his work and his ability to dissect problems into their primitives leads him to really elegant solutions (0x5f3759df! [1]).

If it weren't for John I would have absolutely no interest in VR... but with his involvement it's hard to not be at least a little curious.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

[nerdy]

I didn't say he developed it. He used it 3-4 years before it became widely known and was responsible at least in part for its proliferation.

Finding your way to an elegant solution does not mean you created that solution. In 1999, Google had 8 employees. Not every algorithm was available at his fingertips. He had to care, seek, and find that solution to use it back then, which might not seem like much now. That's a manifestation of his caring about his craft; not inventing an algorithm.

[kyberias]

But the Wikipedia page does not really attribute the derivation of that constant to Carmack. Rather "...he demurred and suggested it was written by Terje Mathisen".

[thebelal]

Carmack is one of my role models as well, but 0x5f3759df while neat did not originate from him, as it states multiple times in the Wikipedia article you cite.

[slazaro]

From the same article you linked:

> John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, is commonly associated with the code, though he actually did not write it.