Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.''

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Let me start not logically, but psychologically. I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things.

You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

For example, when I came to Bell Labs, I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us did it at the same place and at the same time - it was in the atmosphere. And you can say, ``Yes, it was luck.'' On the other hand you can say, ``But why of all the people in Bell Labs then were those the two who did it?'' Yes, it is partly luck, and partly it is the prepared mind; but `partly' is the other thing I'm going to talk about. So, although I'll come back several more times to luck, I want to dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you do great work or not. I claim you have some, but not total, control over it. And I will quote, finally, Newton on the matter. Newton said, ``If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.''

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There's lots of gem in this piece. Worth re-reading periodically.

6ren · on Oct 22, 2011

> I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself.

What are the important problems in computer science today?

NP=P; "real" AI; speech recognition, natural language processing, image recognition; multi-core processing; ... ?

What are the important problems in webapps; the cloud; mobile?

OR impedance mismatch; ... ?

Some guide are things are improving rapidly (an indicator of demand for improvement) and painful annoyances.

EDIT Sorry, I just meant them as separate questions. I've clarified by using separate lines and adding some guesses.

p4bl0 · on Oct 22, 2011

I think what he means here is that even if one prove that P=NP, the result itself will have little to no consequences on our daily lives. That is, except if the proof is a constructive reduction from an NP-complete problem to a P problem, but that's highly unlikely. However, the proof itself would be very interesting, because it is likely to involve new technics that would surely be appliable somewhere else and help science in general solve other problems. Also having such a proof would certainly mean that the original question has been reformulated, for instance in something which correspond better to real life than the current, theoretical P vs NP separation. And that's of course also worthy in itself because it means we understand this problem, and surely some other more or less related problems, way better.

hboon · on Oct 22, 2011

An inspirational read about how getting your priorities right plays a big role in success.