Richard Hamming Quotes

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.

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

Much of present science rests on engineering tools, and as time goes on, engineering seems to involve more and more of the science part. ...the two fields are growing together! ...and now there is not enough time to allow us the leisure which comes from separating the two fields.

Transmission through space (typically signaling) is the same as transmission through time (storage).

Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions.

The assumptions and definitions of mathematics and science come from our intuition, which is based ultimately on experience. They then get shaped by further experience in using them and are occasionally revised. They are not fixed for all eternity.

The methods of mathematics are the main topic of the course, not a long list of finished mathematical results with such highly polished proofs that the poor student can only marvel at the results, with no hope of understanding how mathematics is actually created by practicing mathematicians.

The people at the bottom do not have the larger, global view, but at the top they do not have the local view of all the details, many of which can often be very important, so either extreme gets poor results.

Beware of finding what you're looking for.

[A favorite aphorism he often used.]

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

Very few of us in our saner moments believe that the particular postulates that some logicians have dreamed up create the numbers - no, most of us believe that the real numbers are simply there and that it has been an interesting, amusing, and important game to try to find a nice set of postulates to account for them.

The reason this happens so often is the creators have to fight through so many dark difficulties, and wade through so much misunderstanding and confusion, they cannot see the light as others can, now the door is open and the path made easy. Please remember, the inventor often has a very limited view of what he invented, and some others (you?) can see much more.

Probability is the mathematics of uncertainty. ...many modern theories have uncertainty built into their foundations. Thus learning to think in terms of probability is essential.

This text is organized in the "spiral" for learning. A topic... is returned to again and again, each time higher up in the spiral. The first time around you may not be completely sure of what is going on, but on the repeated returns to the topic it should gradually become clear. This is necessary when the ideas are not simple but require a depth of understanding...

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