You and Your Research - Richard Hamming

Yes, THAT Richard Hamming
Bell Communications Research Colloquim Seminar, 3/17/1986

This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question ``Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?''

This is an extremely edited list of excerpt - my original list of excerpts would have been 10 times longer. If you are at all interested by any of the excerpts below, I would highly recommend reading the entire transcript.

Now, why is this talk important? I think it is important because, as far as I know, each of you has one life to live.

And I will cite Pasteur who said, 'Luck favors the prepared mind.'

...often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset.

'Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, 'Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'

'It is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the best answer he can.'

If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, 'I am going to do it my way,' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.

Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset?

...you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist.

If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

If you want to be a great researcher, you won't make it being president of the company... When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go.