Richard Hamming Quotes

I am ready to strongly suggest that a lot of what we see comes from the glasses we put on. Of course this goes against much of what you have been taught, but consider the arguments carefully. You can say that it was the experiment that forced the model on us, but I suggest that the more you think about the four examples the more uncomfortable you are apt to become. They are not arbitrary theories that I have selected, but ones which are central to physics.

Thus my first answer to the implied question about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is that we approach the situations with an intellectual apparatus so that we can only find what we do in many cases. It is both that simple, and that awful. What we were taught about the basis of science being experiments in the real world is only partially true.

The Turing test is a popular approach, but it flies in the face of the standard scientific method, which starts with the easier problems before facing the harder ones. Thus I soon raised the question with myself, “What is the smallest or close to the smallest program I would believe could think?” Clearly, if the program were divided into two parts, then neither piece could think. I tried thinking about it each night as I put my head on the pillow to sleep, and after a year of considering the problem and getting nowhere I decided it was the wrong question! Perhaps “thinking” is not a yes/no thing, but maybe it is a matter of degree.

an examination of history and of reports of those who have done great work, all seem to show that typically the pattern of creativity is as follows. There is first the recognition of the problem in some dim sense. This is followed by a longer or shorter period of refinement of the problem. Do not be too hasty at this stage, as you are likely to put the problem in the conventional form and find only the conventional solution. This stage, moreover, requires your emotional involvement, your commitment to finding a solution, since without a deep emotional involvement you are not likely to find a really fundamental, novel solution.

To see the obvious it often takes an outsider, or else someone like me who is thoughtful and wonders what he is doing and why it is all necessary. Even when told, the old timers will persist in the ways they learned, probably out of pride for their past and an unwillingness to admit there are better ways than those they were using for so long.

In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen?

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full, beautiful expression of what “You and Your Research” sketched in outline.

computers have given top management the power to micromanage their organization, and top management has shown little or no ability to resist using this power. You can regularly read in the papers some big corporation is decentralizing, but when you follow it for several years you see they merely intended to do so, but did not.

Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work.

Indeed, to generalize, almost all of our experiences in this world do not fall under the domain of science or mathematics. Furthermore, we know (at least we think we do) that from Godel's theorem there are definite limits to what pure logical manipulation of symbols can do, there are limits to the domain of mathematics. It has been an act of faith on the part of scientists that the world can be explained in the simple terms that mathematics handles. When you consider how much science has not answered then you see that our successes are not so impressive as they might otherwise appear.

You must learn to walk before you run in this matter of being creative, but I believe it can be done. Furthermore, if you are to succeed (to the extent you secretly wish to), you must become creative in the face of the rapidly changing technology which will dominate your career. Society will not stand still for you; it will evolve more and more rapidly as technology plays an increasing role at all levels of the organization. My job is to make you one of the leaders in this changing world, not a follower, and I am trying my best to alter you, especially in getting you to take charge of yourself and not to depend on others, such as me, to help.

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.

Is it not fair to say, “The program learned from experience”? Your immediate objection is that there was a program telling the machine how to learn. But when you take a course in Euclidean geometry, is not the teacher putting a similar learning program into you? Poorly, to be sure, but is that not, in a real sense, what a course in geometry is all about? You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. Think it over carefully. If you deny the machine learns from experience because you claim the program was told (by the human programmer) how to improve its performance, then is not the situation much the same with you, except you are born with a somewhat larger initial program compared to the machine when it leaves the manufacturer’s hands? Are you sure you are not merely “programmed” in life by what chance events happen to you?

When something is claimed to be new, do not be too hasty to think it is just the past slightly improved - it might be a great opportunity for you to do significant things. But again it may be nothing new.

It is necessary to emphasize this. We begin with a vague concept in our minds, then we create various sets of postulates, and gradually we settle down to one particular set. In the rigorous postulational approach the original concept is now replaced by what the postulates define. This makes further evolution of the concept rather difficult and as a result tends to slow down the evolution of mathematics. It is not that the postulation approach is wrong, only that its arbitrariness should be clearly recognized, and we should be prepared to change postulates when the need becomes apparent.

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.