Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Net sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

Pausch died at his home in Chesapeake, Va., said Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer who co-wrote Pausch’s book. Pausch and his family had moved there last fall to be closer to his wife’s relatives.

Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon

in September 2007 garnered worldly attention and was viewed by millions on the Web.

In it, Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending death.

“The lecture was for my kids, but whether others are finding value in it, that is wonderful,” Pausch wrote on his Web site. “But rest assured; I’m hardly strange.”

The book “The Last Lecture” leaped to the top of the […]

Orginal post by Top Tech News