Richard Hamming - Course Quotes

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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
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
In the long run, the methods are the important part of the course. It is not enough to know the theory; you should be able to apply it.

Richard Hamming
Besides the theory there are a lot of small technical details that must be learned so well that you can recall them almost instantaneously, such as the trigonometric identities... put one part of the identity on one side of a 3 x 5 card and the other part on the other side. Using these flash cards you can, in the odd moments of your daily life, learn the mechanical parts of the course.... for this kind of low-level material many short learning sessions are much more efficient than a few long, intense ones; but this is not necessarily true for larger ideas.... most students will not use such trivial devices as flash cards; it seems to be beneath their dignity. They suffer accordingly.

Richard Hamming
When you take a course in Euclidean geometry is not the teacher putting a... learning program into you?... 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.... Are you sure you are not merely "programmed" in life by what by chance events happens to you?

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

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
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