Randy Pausch

Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who worked on virtual reality and built Alice, a programming environment designed so that children learning to code would never see an error message. In September 2007, with pancreatic cancer and months left, he gave a talk called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, filmed for the university and then watched by millions. The Last Lecture is that talk written up with Jeffrey Zaslow, and it is addressed to his three young children far more than to any reader. He died in July 2008 at forty-seven.