Richard Hamming Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

Richard Hamming
Statistics should be taught early so that the concepts are absorbed by the student's flexible, adaptable mind before it is too late.

Richard Hamming
Increasingly... the application of mathematics to the real world involves discrete mathematics... the nature of the discrete is often most clearly revealed through the continuous models of both calculus and probability. Without continuous mathematics, the study of discrete mathematics soon becomes trivial and very limited.... The two topics, discrete and continuous mathematics, are both ill served by being rigidly separated.

Richard Hamming
In the face of almost infinite useful knowledge, we have adopted the strategy of "information regeneration rather than information retrieval."... most importantly, you should be able to generate the result you need even if no one has ever done it before you—you will not be dependent on the past to have done everything you will ever need in mathematics.

Richard Hamming
What you learn from others you can use to follow.
What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.

Richard Hamming
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.

Richard Hamming
Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

Richard Hamming
There is no unique, correct answer in most cases. It is a matter of taste, depending on the circumstances... and the particular age you live in.... Gradually, you will develop your own taste, and along the way you may occasionally recognize that your taste may be the best one! It is the same as an art course.

Richard Hamming
The Buddha told his disciples, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense". I say the same to you—you must assume the responsibility for what you believe.

Richard Hamming
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.

Richard Hamming
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.

Richard Hamming
A central problem in teaching mathematics is to communicate a reasonable sense of taste—meaning often when to, or not to, generalize, abstract, or extend something you have just done.

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

Richard Hamming
The feeling of having free will is deep in us and we are reluctant to give it up for ourselves—but we are often willing to deny it to others!

Richard Hamming
An idea which arises in the field, based on the direct experience of the people doing the job, cannot get going in a centrally controlled system... The not invented here (NIH) syndrome is one of the major curses of our society...

Richard Hamming
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 the pure state.

Richard Hamming
There is no agreed upon definition of mathematics, but there is widespread agreement that the essence of mathematics is extension, generalization, and abstraction... [which] often bring increased confidence in the results of a specific application, as well as new viewpoints.

Richard Hamming
The standard process of organizing knowledge into departments, and subderpartments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses.

Richard Hamming
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. [...] The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. [...] The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after.

Richard Hamming
The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.

Richard Hamming
We are beginning to find not only is intelligence not adequately defined so arguments can be settled scientifically, but a lot of other associated words like, computer, learning, information, ideas, decisions, expert behavior—all are a bit fuzzy...

Richard Hamming
Faced with almost an infinity of details you cannot afford to deal constantly with the specific; you must learn to embrace more and more detail under the cover of generality.

Richard Hamming
We are mainly interested in the processes... not... in presenting mathematics in its most abstract form.... we will often begin with concrete forms and then exhibit the process of abstraction.

Richard Hamming
Any unwillingness to learn mathematics today can greatly restrict your possibilities tomorrow.

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

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

Richard Hamming
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.

Richard Hamming
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.

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

Richard Hamming
It is easy to measure your mastery of the results via a conventional examination; it is less easy to measure your mastery of doing mathematics, of creating new (to you) results, and of your ability to surmount the almost infinite details to see the general situation.

Richard Hamming