Richard Hamming Quotes

If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you'll do important work.

the current situation being a toss-up as to what you want to believe. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. Hence you will find that often what you believe is what you want to believe, rather than being the result of careful thinking.

I need to discuss science vs. engineering. Put glibly:
In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.
In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

Typing is no substitute for thinking.

It is probable that the future will be more limited by the slow evolution of the human animal and the corresponding human laws, social institutions, and organizations than it will be by the rapid evolution of technology.

Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions.

While the problem of ai can be viewed as, “Which of all the things humans do can machines also do?,” I would prefer to ask the question in another form: “Of all of life’s burdens, which are those machines can relieve, or significantly ease, for us?

Assuming you rise to the top, please remember: what made you great may not be appropriate for the next generation.

computers are now often an essential component of a good design.

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things.

Probability plays a central role in many fields, from quantum mechanics to information theory, and even older fields use probability now that the presence of "noise" is officially admitted. The newer aspects of many fields start with the admission of uncertainty.

I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

I had incipient ulcers most of the years that I was at Bell Labs. I have since gone off to the Naval Postgraduate School and laid back somewhat, and now my health is much better. But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last, is what Leo Durocher said. If you want to lead a nice happy life with a lot of recreation and everything else, you’ll lead a nice life.

The idea that theorems follow from the postulates does not correspond to simple observation. If the Pythagorean theorem were found to not follow from the postulates, we would again search for a way to alter the postulates until it was true. Euclid's postulates came from the Pythagorean theorem, not the other way around.