Every year Knuth gives a Christmas lecture in early December, and every year (at least the last few years) David Cassel writes a blog post about it; here is this year's: https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2025-christmas-lecture-...

One could say these are the compsci counterpart of the Queen's Christmas Speeches.

Lectures archive: https://online.stanford.edu/donald-e-knuth-lectures

The Stanford linkrot bandits have struck again I’m afraid.

For what it's worth (and though I do have some complaints about stanfordonline), the URL https://online.stanford.edu/donald-e-knuth-lectures works fine for me.

The YouTube channel seems to have them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94E35692EB9D36F3

Thanks for that. They seem to have been embarrassed into putting the stanford.edu page back up for another few months. I think my first encounter with Stanford's website archival policies was when I found that they'd shot an old, once-much-hyped interview with Alvy Ray Smith into the void: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064844 . Anything on the Stanford website which purports to be education or history is a marketing op wearing a smiling mask. That in itself would be largely fine, but when the marketing objectives have been met they'll delete everything with what seems to be a contemptuous glee, refusing to even use the Wayback Machine. Doesn't say much for that institution.

As I had never seem an image of Don Knuth before, my head always pulls up an image of Don Knotts whenever I see his name :)

I guess that will change now.

For good measure you might as well see what the young Knuth looked like, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhh8Ao4yweQ .

Good move. They look quite different.