Richard Hamming - Probability Quotes

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Probability plays a central role in many fields, from quantum mechanics to information theory, and even older fields use probability now that the presence of "noise" is officially admitted. The newer aspects of many fields start with the admission of uncertainty.

Richard Hamming
Unfortunately... the ADA language was designed by experts, and it shows all the non-humane features you can expect from them. It is... a typical Computer Science hacking job—do not try and understand what you are doing, just get it running. As a result of this poor psychological design... although a government contract may specify the programming be in ADA, probably over 90% will be done in FORTRAN, debugged, tested, and then painfully, by hand, be converted to a poor ADA program, with a high probability of errors!

Richard Hamming
Continuous distributions are basic to the theory of probability and statistics, and the calculus is necessary to handle them with any ease.

Richard Hamming
Probability is the mathematics of uncertainty.... many modern theories have uncertainty built into their foundations. Thus learning to think in terms of probability is essential.

Richard Hamming
Probability and statistics are now so obviously necessary tools for understanding many diverse things that we must not ignore them even for the average student.

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
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