Richard Hamming Quotes

Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions.

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.

Often it is not physical limitations... but rather it is human made laws, habits, and organizational rules, regulations, personal egos, and inertia, which dominate the evolution of the future.

It is obvious: The past was once the future and the future will become the past.

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.

All of engineering involves some creativity to cover the parts not known, and almost all of science includes some practical engineering to translate the abstractions into practice.

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. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.

Either you will be a leader, or a follower, and my goal is for you to be a leader.

I am concerned with educating and not training you. ...Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. Either one without the other is not of much use. You might think education should precede training, but the kind of educating I am trying to do must be based on your past experiences and technical knowledge.

The past is... much more uncertain—or even falsely reported—than is usually recognized.

Apparently an "art"—which almost by definition cannot be put into words—is probably best communicated by approaching it from many sides and doing so repeatedly, hoping thereby students will finally master enough of the art, or if you wish, style, to significantly increase their future contributions to society.

Great results in science and engineering are "bunched" in the same person too often for success to be a matter of random luck.

Since I was trying to teach "style" of thinking in science and engineering, and "style" is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts—once the fundamentals have been learned. How to become a great painter cannot be taught in words... Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions... more or less as the points arise in the student's head—which is where learning is supposed to occur!

If the prior distribution, at which I am frankly guessing, has little or no effect on the result, then why bother; and if it has a large effect, then since I do not know what I am doing how would I dare act on the conclusions drawn?

Probability is too important to be left to the experts. [...] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. [...] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.