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Randy Pausch liked to say that he started out as a computer science professor and ended up as a "media-based inspirer."

A teacher who unintentionally found fame on the Internet, he was best known for a lecture he delivered Sept. 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Part of the school's Last Lecture series, in which academics are invited to speak as though it were their last address, Dr. Pausch took the podium just months after receiving a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer.

His lecture, delivered with Jim Carrey-flair and dark humour, soon became a sensation on the Internet where it has been viewed more than six million times. In the hour-long talk, he showed slides of his many accomplishments, academic and personal, including pictures of his childhood bedroom walls, on which he had painted murals of submarines and elevators, and had scribbled indelible math equations.

"If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favour to me, let them do it," he said. "Don't worry about your resale value."

After the lecture appeared on the Internet, Dr. Pausch was inundated with e-mails from people who said they had been inspired by his words, and were now encouraging their children to unleash their creativity on the family home.

"I've lost count of the number of rooms that are now going to be badly painted," said Jeff Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal columnist who co-wrote The Last Lecture, a bestselling book based on Dr. Pausch's address. "Randy would joke that he didn't exactly mean everybody go let your kids scribble on the walls, he meant only if there's an interest."

Dr. Pausch was interested in science from a young age. Raised by two supportive and energetic parents - his lecture included a slide show of his father on a roller coaster at age 83 - the young man dreamed of enjoying the weightlessness of space.

Fiercely determined, he was originally rejected by Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he would receive a bachelor's degree in computer science, but called every day until the school agreed to take him off the waiting list.

At the urging of an undergraduate adviser at Brown, he decided to go to graduate school and become a professor. He had been told that he was such a good salesman, he might as well sell something useful like education.

He did his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon, where he spent the majority of his teaching career after a short stint at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

As a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design, he was considered a pioneer of virtual-reality research and left his mark on both his school and the wider world of computer programming. At Carnegie Mellon, he founded a cross-discipline course called Building Virtual Worlds, which he taught for 10 years. The class drew students from five different faculties who were required to work in teams to create five virtual-reality projects.

The only restriction was a ban Dr. Pausch put on violence and pornography. "Not because I'm opposed to those in particular, but just because it's been done before with [virtual reality]," he said in his famous lecture. "You'd be amazed how many 19-year-old boys are completely out of ideas when you take those off the table."

The success of the course led him to co-found the Entertainment Technology Centre, a two-year master's program designed to bring artists and engineers together, and which he fondly described as the Cirque du Soleil of graduate schools.

Achieving one of his childhood dreams, he took a sabbatical to work at the Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts studio, where he helped develop virtual-reality rides, but turned down a full-time job so that he could continue teaching.

With the help of his students, Dr. Pausch created a software program called Alice, an open-source educational system that teaches people to build their own three-dimensional worlds. "Millions of kids having fun while learning something hard. I can deal with that as a legacy," he said of the program. "To the extent that you can live on in something, I will live on in Alice."

His lecture chronicled his success in achieving other childhood dreams, from experiencing zero gravity to writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia. He accomplished the first after leading a group of students to win a NASA-sponsored contest that would allow them to ride in a so-called "vomit comet," an airplane that achieves weightlessness by flying in parabolic arcs.

Dr. Pausch was originally informed that faculty members were not allowed to accompany student teams on the flight, so he sent a fax to NASA explaining that he would instead be attending as a member of the local news media. "It's really easy to get a press pass," he explained.

After his lecture became an online phenomenon, Dr. Pausch saw even more of his childhood dreams come true.

Having once spoken of a long-ago desire to play in the National Football League, he was soon invited to practise with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He had also joked that he wanted to be Captain Kirk, the fictional hero of TV's original Star Trek series. Director J. J. Abrams offered him a small role in a film to be released in 2009, including one line of dialogue: "See, I'm still here." Entitled simply Star Trek, the movie is described as a prequel to the original series.

Yesterday, his friend and co-author Mr. Zaslow recalled sitting in the audience for the original lecture, laughing and crying along with 400 of Dr. Pausch's friends, colleagues and students.

It was the first time Mr. Zaslow had laid eyes on him. As a journalist who writes a column on life transitions, he had heard about the coming lecture and phoned Dr. Pausch the night before. He was so impressed by their talk that he decided to attend, even though his editors had refused to pay for a flight and had told him to do the interview by telephone. "Once I was there, I knew I'd seen something remarkable," Mr. Zaslow said.

After the lecture, the two men met for the first time and Dr. Pausch said he would spend his remaining months with his wife and children.

Later, the men were reportedly paid more than $6-million (U.S.) byDisney-owned publisher Hyperion for their book. At first, Dr. Pausch had been reluctant to take on the project, saying it would take too much time away from his children. As a compromise, Mr. Zaslow interviewed him for one hour every 53 days. That hour was the time Dr. Pausch set aside to ride a stationary bike to keep his strength up.

Mr. Zaslow said he was not surprised that his friend's message, in all its incarnations, struck such a chord. "It's because we're all dying. His fate is our fate and it's just sped up," he said. "So, watching how he approached even his death as an adventure, it just resonates with people. He had a way of turning his own life into lessons."

Dr. Pausch even taught his co-author a thing or two. Mr. Zaslow became addicted to Googling the professor's name, fascinated by the number of people around the world who had been drawn to the story. "He told me a few weeks ago to stop Googling and go hug my kids," Mr. Zaslow said yesterday. "So when I hug my kids and when I Google, I'm going to think of him."

But his friend was not Superman, Mr. Zaslow said. In the book, Dr. Pausch admitted to crying at night with his wife, and sometimes while alone in the shower.

In his final months, he asked Mr. Zaslow to stop forwarding him e-mails from fans. The attention, he said, was too overwhelming. "But then, last week, he was going through his own e-mails and he sent me some funny ones. I was so thrilled to see him re-engaged. That was the last I heard from him."

In May, Time magazine named Dr. Pausch as one of the world's top-100 influential people. Two months earlier, he had appeared before a United States Senate subcommittee, where he pushed for increased federal funding for pancreatic cancer research.

He liked to joke that his mother would introduce him as a doctor, "but not the kind who helps people."

But becoming a professor allowed him to enable the childhood dreams of others, he said, and the website for his book is filled with thank-you messages from those he inspired.

Dr. Pausch asked Carnegie Mellon not to copyright his lecture so that it could remain in the public domain, even though the talk had been aimed at his children. "I'm speaking only to them," he told The New York Times. "I didn't set out to tell the world about how to live life."

The school has created a memorial scholarship in his honour for women in computer science, and will give his name to a footbridge linking the new computer science building and the Center for the Arts, symbolizing the way he joined those two departments together. The bridge's design will give pedestrians a sense that a brick wall is ahead of them, a tribute to one of the most popular lines in his lecture.

"The brick walls are there for a reason," he said. "The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something."

A techie to the end, Dr. Pausch was thrilled by the concept, and joked that the only deathbed conversion he experienced was the decision to buy a Mac computer.

RANDY PAUSCH

Randolph Frederick Pausch was born Oct. 23, 1960. He died July 24, 2008, of pancreatic cancer in Chesapeake, Va. He was 47. He leaves his wife, Jai, and children Dylan, Logan and Chloe, to whom his lecture was dedicated.

Randy Pausch on life and death

ON FACING CHALLENGES

"Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!"

ON EXPERIENCE

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

ON DREAMS

"It's not about how to achieve your dreams; it's about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the dreams will come to you."

ON DEALING WITH ENEMIES

"Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you. When you're pissed off at someone and angry, you just haven't given them enough time."

ON DYING

"I don't know how to not have fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left."