Richard Hamming Short Quotes

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The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Richard Hamming
Calculus systematically evades a great deal of numerical calculation.

Richard Hamming
Perhaps thinking should be measured not by what you do but by how you do it.

Richard Hamming
Calculus is the mathematics of change.... Change is characteristic of the world.

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

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

Richard Hamming
Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions.

Richard Hamming
Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past.

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

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

Richard Hamming
The Postulates of Mathematics Were Not on the Stone Tablets that Moses Brought Down from Mt. Sinai.

Richard Hamming
The beauty of mathematics often makes the subject matter much more attractive and easier to master.

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

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

Richard Hamming
We must not forget, in all the enthusiasm for computer simulations, occasionally we must look at Nature as She is.

Richard Hamming
There are so many ways of being wrong and so few ways of being right that it is much more economical to study successes.

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
Theorems... record more complex patterns of thinking that once shown to be valid need not be repeated every time they are needed.

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
We constantly use the word "simplify", but its meaning depends on what you are going to do next, and there is no uniform definition.

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

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
We do not always know what we are talking about.... Troubles... can be made to arise whenever what is being said includes itself—a self-referral situation.

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
If you expect to continue learning all your life, you will be teaching yourself much of the time. You must learn to learn, especially the difficult topic of mathematics.

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
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
When a theory is sufficiently general to cover many fields of application, it acquires some "truth" from each of them. Thus... a positive value for generalization in mathematics.

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