RIP
He died yesterday
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08208/899724-85.stm
Randy Pausch, CMU professor who inspired millions, dies
Saturday, July 26, 2008
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Bob Donaldson/Post-Gazette
Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon's commencement in May.
In a recent e-mail exchange with his friend and co-author, Jeffrey Zaslow, Randy Pausch said he was still amazed at how he had been transformed from boyish computer science professor to a "worldwide media-based inspirer."
But that is exactly what happened to Dr. Pausch, whose final lecture last September at Carnegie Mellon University on how to live a grateful, fulfilling life has now been viewed more than 10 million times on the Internet. A follow-up book with Mr. Zaslow has 2.8 million copies in print, in 30 languages.
Dr. Pausch, 47, died yesterday from the pancreatic cancer he had been fighting for nearly two years, leaving behind his wife and three young children.
Steve Seabolt, a vice president at video game maker Electronic Arts and one of Dr. Pausch's best friends, was with him when he died at about 4 a.m. in Chesapeake, Va., where he moved after his final lecture to spend his remaining time with his wife, children and family.
Dr. Pausch had remained lucid until near the end, Mr. Seabolt said, and had even made a couple trips up and down the stairs of his home the day before he died, although "his energy was minimal."
After his Sept. 18 lecture, Dr. Pausch had taken chemotherapy to extend his life but stopped that treatment in the last few weeks. Even so, he and his wife Jai were still considering an experimental cancer vaccine treatment up until he became very ill in recent days, Mr. Seabolt said.
Besides his wife, Dr. Pausch leaves behind three children -- Dylan, 7; Logan, 3; and Chloe, 2; his mother, Virginia, of Columbia, Md.; and a sister, Tamara Mason, of Lynchburg, Va.
It is to the children that he dedicated his lecture and the book, and it is for them that he has created special videos and other mementoes that will help them recall him years from now.
In the lecture and book and in his appearances on such TV programs as "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and ABC's "Primetime," he earned the admiration of millions with his focus on pursuing childhood dreams, learning how to be humble, working hard and seeing brick walls as challenges rather than obstacles.
When Dr. Pausch stepped into McConomy Auditorium at Carnegie Mellon last September, he had been fighting pancreatic cancer -- the deadliest of all malignancies -- for nearly a year, with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
The initial round of intensive therapy put him into remission, but just as he began feeling healthy again in the summer of 2007, doctors found several new tumors in his liver and spleen. "The doctors say it is one of the most aggressive recurrences they have ever seen," he reported in his online diary.
He told the audience at Carnegie Mellon that his doctors had given him about five more months to live, but that he wasn't going to talk about his cancer or his family. Instead, he would concentrate on the valuable lessons he had learned during his life and the joy he had experienced.
"If I don't seem as morose or depressed as I should be -- sorry to disappoint you," he said, and then wowed the crowd by dropping to the floor and doing several pushups to show how strong he felt.
A dynamic, well-liked computer science professor, Dr. Pausch was a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, in which people can experience alternative worlds, often by donning headsets that immerse them in a video environment.
He helped found the university's Entertainment Technology Center, often cited as the nation's leading academic training center for video game designers, and was the guiding force behind Alice, a curriculum that teaches computer programming to students through animated storytelling.
He was raised in Columbia, Md., and wrote in his book that "I won the parent lottery."
His mother was "a tough, old-school English teacher with nerves of titanium. She worked her students hard, enduring those parents who complained that she expected too much from her kids."
His father, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, "sold auto insurance in inner-city Baltimore," but also founded a nonprofit group to help immigrants' children learn English.
Growing up, Dr. Pausch had several dreams, many of which he eventually got to fulfill, such as working for a time with the Disney Co.'s Imagineering unit and experiencing weightlessness aboard a U.S. Air Force plane.
One goal he never achieved was playing in the National Football League, but he said the lessons he absorbed from his school coach were probably as valuable as anything else he learned, especially when he was being yelled at for his mistakes, because "when you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that's when they've given up on you."
After graduating with a computer science degree from Brown University in 1982, he went on to get his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in 1988, and then taught at the University of Virginia before joining Carnegie Mellon's faculty in 1997.
In his book, Dr. Pausch described himself as a "recovering jerk" who had to learn how to temper his brashness and insensitivity.
But Dan Siewiorek, a friend who heads Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, said Dr. Pausch in fact was adept at dealing diplomatically with difficult situations.
"I would seek his help if I was having a particularly tough problem," Dr. Siewiorek said. "He would tell the truth and be very pragmatic and balanced, but say it in a way that nobody's feelings would be hurt. I'm really going to miss that."
In 2004, Dr. Pausch spent a sabbatical at Electronic Arts, maker of such games as "The Sims," which is where he met Mr. Seabolt. They became friends partly because both had two boys and a girl and "we were both lucky enough to find women who we would say 'married down' to marry us."
In his book, Dr. Pausch was open about how much his wife meant to him and how hard he had to work to persuade her to marry him.
"As for the obvious question," he wrote, "well, here's my answer: Most of all, I want Jai to be happy in the years ahead. So if she finds happiness through remarriage, that will be great. If she finds happiness without remarrying, that also will be great.
"We wouldn't trade our eight years of marriage for anything," he continued, "but it saddens us that we won't get to experience this richness ... for the next 30 or 40 years."
As Dr. Pausch's reputation spread through the Internet and his book, thousands of people e-mailed him with expressions of gratitude, high school students memorized his lecture and performed it in front of audiences, and scores of people set up Web sites dedicated to him.
Mr. Zaslow, the Wall Street Journal columnist who helped write "The Last Lecture," said he had adopted the habit of Googling Dr. Pausch's name each day to see how many more new sites had been set up.
"About a month ago," Mr. Zaslow said yesterday, "he wrote to me and said, 'Will you stop Googling me and go hug your kids?' So I did."
That focus on family and developing good values typified Dr. Pausch's spirituality, said his pastor, the Rev. David Herndon of First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh in Shadyside.
"He was a person of great faith, although unconventional faith," the Rev. Herndon said. "He did not talk about it publicly, but he certainly lived it. I think for Randy what was important was a whole lifetime filled with well-lived moments, one after the other, and the belief that each one would build on the next."
Dr. Pausch devoted many of those moments in recent years to his children.
In his book, he described his oldest, Dylan, as loving, empathetic and "analytical, like his old man." Son Logan "smiles with his whole face; he's the ultimate Tigger." And daughter Chloe quickly made him a member of "Wrapped Around My Daughter's Finger Club."
"I love my three kids completely and differently," he wrote. "And I want them to know I will love them for as long as they live. I will."
Funeral plans,donations
Dr. Pausch's family plans a private funeral in Virginia, and Carnegie Mellon said it would schedule a memorial service at a date to be announced.
The family requests donations to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund (
www.cmu.edu/giving/pausch.shtml), which primarily supports the university's continued work on the Alice project.
I watched this a while ago and its great to see it again. Put out positive vibes and that is what you get in return. 
