Richard Hamming - Science Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all Richard Hamming Quotes
Much of present science rests on engineering tools, and as time goes on, engineering seems to involve more and more of the science part.... the two fields are growing together!... and now there is not enough time to allow us the leisure which comes from separating the two fields.

Richard Hamming
Science and mathematics... have added little to our understanding of such things as Truth, Beauty, and Justice. There may be definite limits to the applicability of the scientific method.

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
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
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
Without real experience in using the computer to get useful results the computer science major is apt to know all about the marvelous tool except how to use it. Such a person is a mere technician, skilled in manipulating the tool but with little sense of how and when to use it for its basic purposes.

Richard Hamming
You live in an age that is dominated by science and engineering.... Thus if you wish to be effective in the world and to achieve the things that you want, it is necessary to understand both science and engineering (and those require mathematics).

Richard Hamming
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? In a sense the first is Science... The second is Engineering.. The third is ethics, morals, or... value judgements.... you will probably have an idea of how to alter things to make the more desirable future occur... having a vision is what tends to separate the leaders from the followers.

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
Since I was trying to teach "style" of thinking in science and engineering, and "style" is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts—once the fundamentals have been learned. How to become a great painter cannot be taught in words... Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions... more or less as the points arise in the student's head—which is where learning is supposed to occur!

Richard Hamming
All of engineering involves some creativity to cover the parts not known, and almost all of science includes some practical engineering to translate the abstractions into practice.

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 assumptions and definitions of mathematics and science come from our intuition, which is based ultimately on experience. They then get shaped by further experience in using them and are occasionally revised. They are not fixed for all eternity.

Richard Hamming