“I’m speaking only to them,” he said. “I didn’t set out to tell the world about how to live life.”

After Mr. Zaslow, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus who is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the talk, it quickly became an Internet sensation.

Image Randy F. Pausch on a monorail with his son, Dylan, and father, Fred, who died in 2006.

With the clarity of thought that perhaps only a person facing death can muster, Dr. Pausch, in his lecture and his book, outlines his recipe for a happy life and achieving dreams.

He talks of reaching his childhood goals of experiencing zero gravity, writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia, winning giant stuffed animals at amusement parks and being a Disney “imagineer.” Much of his talk is about tenacity and how he managed to scale the “brick walls” that stood in the way of achieving some of his dreams. Other lessons are those that all parents hope to teach their children  show gratitude, tell the truth, no job is beneath you.

And he urges parents to let their children draw on the bedroom walls  where the young Randy Pausch painted a quadratic equation, a rocket, an elevator and, from one of his favorite stories, Pandora’s box. At the bottom of the box, he added the word “Hope” that a friend later preceded with “Bob.”

Dr. Pausch says he is trying to use his unexpected celebrity to draw attention to the lack of financing for pancreatic cancer research. Testifying before Congress on behalf of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (www.pancan.org), he showed a picture of his family. “This is my widow,” he said pointing to his wife, Jai. “That’s not a grammatical construction you get to use every day, but there aren’t many diseases where you know it will be fatal.”

Because Dr. Pausch has outlived his initial prognosis, a few bloggers have begun to speculate that he is not really dying. Doctors at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Pittsburgh have confirmed Dr. Pausch’s diagnosis and treatment.

“There’s nothing to be cynical about in how he’s choosing to approach these last months of his life,” said Robbee Kosak, vice president for university advancement at Carnegie Mellon. “He’s always been very passionate. He’s always very pragmatic. He knows exactly what his priorities are. People like Randy are so rare. We should all be really happy that so many of us have had a chance now to see that it’s possible to live your life with passion and energy and candor.”