Last Lecture

A lot of professors give talks titled The Last Lecture. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave-- Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams --wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think ). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

About The Author:

About the Author

Computer science professor, Randy Pausch, was born on October 23, 1960. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988. He was a member of the computer science faculty at the University of Virginia from 1988 to 1997 and spent a 1995 sabbatical working at Walt Disney Imagineering's Virtual Reality Studio before joining the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University. He was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center and created the innovative educational software tool known as Alice that enables novices to create 3-D computer animations using a drag-and-drop interface. In September 2007, he gave a lecture entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, which was videotaped, found success on the Internet, and lead to a best-selling book entitled The Last Lecture. He died due to complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.