On September 30, members of Stanford's Computer Science Department gathered to bid farewell to Phyllis Astrid Benson Winkler, on the occasion of her retirement after 32 years of service. During those years she was one of the key reasons for our department's successes; thus she indirectly had a substantial influence on the progress of computer science as a whole. We appreciated her intelligence, her efficiency, her world-class expertise at producing beautiful technical documents, her team spirit, her willingness to go the extra mile, and her contagious laughter.
I was fortunate to have had Phyllis as my secretary and essential co-pilot during the past 28 years; without her I could not have accomplished nearly as much. She typed more than 200 of my papers, most of which required several rounds of revisions. She buffered all of my mail and telephone messages. She administered the editorial work of more than a dozen technical journals, and helped out with numerous research projects. She made online indexes of all the correspondence in our files. She did all of the initial keyboarding for the new editions of The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1 and 3 (see below) --- amounting to more than 1500 printed pages of what printers used to call ``penalty copy'' because it is so hard to do. And so on and so on; what a team we made! And she was simultaneously also serving as secretary for several other faculty members.
When I originally wrote the TeX typesetting system, I intended it to be a tool just for Phyllis and me, but mostly for Phyllis. Soon other people decided to use it too, but Phyllis's influence on the TeX project has nevertheless been enormous. One of the events at her retirement party was the reading of a resolution recently passed by the board of directors of the TeX Users Group, expressing their appreciation for all of her contributions during the past 20 years. I'm sure people all over the world are sad that they will no longer be communicating with her at Stanford, yet wishing her happiness as she changes to a life of voluntary community service.
I can't express in words the enormous debt of gratitude I feel, but I have tried to do that in part by dedicating the book Literate Programming to her. I certainly wish her a long and productive life in retirement."
Thanks for posting it, this is very nice indeed. Kudos to him for sharing the credit. Maybe he's not that of an evil person as I have pictured before. But the discussion around here made me realize once more that there is still a problem lying around here. People tend to attribute the works we see around to a single person when in reality it's a team's work. And I'm not only talking about the very close circle these people are working with but also many others in the service industry that we interact daily in an indirect fashion. This is very dangerous. It makes people think that their work is inferior since it is not as useful as what these "celebrities" are doing and eventually leaving them the only choice to give up and rather worship these people instead. This is what I see everyday.
Also note that, while you can see these kinds of notes lying around, there are also many places these don't exists at all. If I were to know Donald Knuth from his wikipedia article, I would not be aware of his secretary at all. So there is some credit but not to the extend that I would like to see.
I think this is a serious issue that needs to be dealt with. Maybe anonymous writing could be a solution, I dont know..
Why would you ever think of Don Knuth as an evil person?
From my few years of contacts with him in the early 80's (he was on the board of our company, a spin-off from the TeX project), he was one of the most gracious, kind, thoughtful, humble people you could ever meet. And I think anyone who met him would agree.
"The End of An Era
On September 30, members of Stanford's Computer Science Department gathered to bid farewell to Phyllis Astrid Benson Winkler, on the occasion of her retirement after 32 years of service. During those years she was one of the key reasons for our department's successes; thus she indirectly had a substantial influence on the progress of computer science as a whole. We appreciated her intelligence, her efficiency, her world-class expertise at producing beautiful technical documents, her team spirit, her willingness to go the extra mile, and her contagious laughter.
I was fortunate to have had Phyllis as my secretary and essential co-pilot during the past 28 years; without her I could not have accomplished nearly as much. She typed more than 200 of my papers, most of which required several rounds of revisions. She buffered all of my mail and telephone messages. She administered the editorial work of more than a dozen technical journals, and helped out with numerous research projects. She made online indexes of all the correspondence in our files. She did all of the initial keyboarding for the new editions of The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1 and 3 (see below) --- amounting to more than 1500 printed pages of what printers used to call ``penalty copy'' because it is so hard to do. And so on and so on; what a team we made! And she was simultaneously also serving as secretary for several other faculty members.
When I originally wrote the TeX typesetting system, I intended it to be a tool just for Phyllis and me, but mostly for Phyllis. Soon other people decided to use it too, but Phyllis's influence on the TeX project has nevertheless been enormous. One of the events at her retirement party was the reading of a resolution recently passed by the board of directors of the TeX Users Group, expressing their appreciation for all of her contributions during the past 20 years. I'm sure people all over the world are sad that they will no longer be communicating with her at Stanford, yet wishing her happiness as she changes to a life of voluntary community service.
I can't express in words the enormous debt of gratitude I feel, but I have tried to do that in part by dedicating the book Literate Programming to her. I certainly wish her a long and productive life in retirement."