By coincidence my parents (who are visiting Shanghai) just mentioned Randy Pausch’ The Last Lecture to me, and I decided to watch it again on YouTube. There I noticed that Randy passed away yesterday, age 47. His Last Lecture was an inspiration for me and many other people.

On the Internet many people are talking about Randy right now. 3o minutes ago he was number 7 in the list of hottest tags on Twitter, and at this moment he is number 3 already (higher than terms like iPhone or Barack Obama). To commemorate him Google even put a link on its homepage to the Last Lecture video, I have never seen Google do that before.

If you want to learn more about Randy, you can see his Wikipedia entry here, his YouTube video here, and a transcript of The Last Lecture here (pdf). Carnegie Mellon University wrote a touching In Memoriam that you can read here.

Rest in Peace.
The Google home page today with the link to Randy Pausch’ video at the bottom