‘Last Lecture’ author dies

By Aaron Lee | 978-7261
Published: July 25, 2008

Randy Pausch, the former University of Virginia professor whose upbeat battle against terminal cancer brought him worldwide acclaim over the past year, died Friday. He was 47.

Pausch was a computer scientist and taught at UVa from 1988 to 1997. On Friday, friends and colleagues at the university remembered his life.

It was in November that Pausch returned to UVa and gave a lecture on time-management to an audience of 850.

“Time is all we have,” Pausch said at the time. “You may find one day that you have less than you think.”

It was a mantra that became a key theme in his lifeafter doctors told him last August that his fight with pancreatic cancer had left him with less than six months of good health.

Pausch, most recently a professor of virtual reality technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, also co-authored a New York Times best-selling book called “The Last Lecture” that mirrored life-affirming ideas he shared during a now-famous talk at Mellon in September.

That lecture, given several weeks after he learned his cancer would likely prove terminal, was recorded and has since found a global audience on Web sites such as YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 3 million times.

The book has been translated into 26 languages.

Pausch gave his November UVa lecture at the request of friend and colleague Gabriel Robins, a UVa computer science professor who met Pausch in 1992.

Robins said Friday that while “The Last Lecture” reached millions, it was Pausch’s work engaging children in computer programming that remains one of his richest legacies.

He is credited with creating “Alice,” where computer novices use easy-to-create 3-D computer animations to build games and movies.

In 1995 he took a sabbatical from UVa and took a job with Disney as an “Imagineer.”

“He injected a dose of fun, perhaps the first dose of fun, in [computer] engineering education,” Robins said.

But he added that Pausch was humbled by the e-mails from fans of his “Last Lecture” book. Many said it had changed their lives.

“‘The Last Lecture’ wasn’t about death, it was about life,” Robins said.

And about Pausch’s young children.

“The book is a message into the future,” Robins said, referring to Pausch’s young children. “Really, it was for them.”

In recent months Pausch had retreated from the outside world to be closer with his family, Robins said. The last time the twocorresponded was via e-mail several months ago.

Alf Weaver, a computer science professor at UVa, was part of the committee that selected Pausch for the UVa job in 1988.

“The way he faced his illness was quintessential Randy,” Weaver said. “Everything was straight on, full face, in your face.”

Pausch’s take on teaching and respect for people earned him admiration, Weaver said.

“I always saw Randy as deeply human,” Weaver said. “That always impressed me.”

In the last year, Pausch appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and was named Person of the Week on ABC’s “World News with Charles Gibson.”

Time magazine recently listed him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Pausch was a graduate of Brown University and Carnegie Mellon Univer-sity.

He is survived by his wife, Jai, and their three children.