Who is Randy Pausch?

Randy Pausch is a professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He was born on October 23, 1960 and died from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008, at the age of 47.

What was he known for?

He was initially known for being a co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), and making the Building Virtual Worlds course at CMU, which he taught for 10 years. He is also the creator of the Alice software project, which is an object-based educational programming language with an integrated development environment (IDE) that uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models. He also received two awards from the Association for Computing Machinery: the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. And Pauch was most known for an upbeat lecture titled, "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007 at CMU.

What are 5 points that you liked in his talk?

1- You should care about time way more than money because you can earn more money at any time, but lost time can not be restored.

2- If things aren’t going well, that probably means that you’re learning a lot, and it’ll go better later.

3- If you've got a bunch of things to do, do the ugliest thing first.

4- Do NOT push things up to the deadline, doing so brings you a lot of stress. If something isn’t due for a long time, make up a fake deadline and act like it’s real.

5- If you get sleep deprived, everything falls apart.