October 12, 2007

After His Last Lecture, a Computer Scientist Contemplates His Final Months

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Randy Pausch didn't want his last lecture to be about dying. He is dying of pancreatic cancer, and he knows it is a painful way to go. But when he walked up to the podium last month to address more than 450 colleagues, students, and friends at Carnegie Mellon University, he intended to demonstrate that his focus is on living. So he did a couple of one-handed push-ups, sprinkled his remarks with jokes, donned props including a Mad Hatter hat, and generally showed that one way to cheat death is

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