Pearl on the tradeoff between quality of search and quality of perception.

Pearl: "I apologize for being so stupid" by treating causality as a probabalistic relationship.

Pearl: "a system that works in a crazy way" - defining the Bayesian belief network.

Scott on inventing the Logic of Computable Functions to win an argument with Christopher Strachey.

Scott on the origins of computer science at Stanford and teaching Barbara Liskov.

Scott explains the thesis he wrote for Alonzo Church on proof in infinite dimensional geometries.

Scott tells how he discovered nondeterministic automata with Michael Rabin in a classic paper.

Aho explains how Lex and YACC revolutionized compiler creation by uniting theory and practice

Aho on inventing indexed grammars and the nested stack automaton for his Ph.D. thesis.

Aho: "I'm the A in AWK."

Aho: Seeing the Dragon Book in Hackers convinced his children that he was "really something."

Aho on the "great crime" of confusing algorithms and procedures.

Wirth on the importance of abstraction to language design

Wirth on Lillith and Modula

Wirth on the implementation and spread of Pascal

Wirth on his first Algol compiler

Kahan on creating IEEE Standard Floating Point

Kahan on HP calculators: Solve, Integrate and Matrix Operations

Kahan on the 8087 and designing Intel's floating point

Kahan remembers JCP Miller, Maurice Wilkes & Jim Wilkinson

Kahan on the FERUT, the first computer he programmed

Feigenbaum on IntelliCorp and Teknowledge

Feigenbaum on editing Computers and Thought

Feigenbaum on the Heuristic Programming Project and DENRAL

Feigenbaum on EAPM, his Ph.D. project with Herb Simon

Feigenbaum on working with Herb Simon and John Backus

Feigenbaum on his family background and love of science

Goldwasser defines a Probabilistically Checkable Proof

Goldwasser on Kilian, Schoof and primality

Goldwasser defines zero knowledge proofs

Goldwasser on hiding partial information in "mental poker"

Goldwasser on being introduced to cryptography by Manuel Blum

Goldwasser on graduate school at Berkeley and Manuel Blum

Lamport on the origins of Paxos

Lamport on Temporal Logic of Actions and refinement mapping

Lamport on Byzantine Generals and Byzantine Failures

Lamport on writing "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System"

Lamport defines safe, regular, and atomic registers

Lamport on discovering the Bakery Algorithm

Kahn on writing "A Protocol for Packet Radio Interconnection" (1974)

Kahn and Cerf on why the ARPANET was built

Kahn on writing the ARPANET proposal

Kahn on inventing ARPANET gateways

Sifakis explains his shift to embedded systems work.

Sifakis on Verimag and "correctness by construction."

Sifakis defines model checking

Sifakis on his first model checking work

Hoare on communicating sequential processes

Hoare on inventing Quicksort

Hoare on the definition and purpose of the Hoare Triple

Hoare's early life and undergraduate education

Stearns on his work with Harry Hunt III

Stearns on his space complexity work with Lewis

Stearns on writing "On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms”

Stearns on his first exposure to computers and computer science

Knuth on taking fonts seriously

Knuth on designing and implementing TeX

Knuth on the origins of TeX

Knuth on choosing Stanford and computer science

Knuth: I told my wife "I think I'm going to write a book" - starting The Art of Computer Programming