## Richard Hamming - "You and Your Research"

During a discussion on the subject of passion in programming, David Bremner on #haskell pointed out Richard Hamming's 1986 talk You and Your Research. Here's a taste:

At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

Hamming clearly describes both the difference between the two and how you can be one of those who do.

## Comment viewing options

### Previously on LtU.

Previously on LtU.

### I missed it the first time, t

I missed it the first time, thanks for (re)posting it.

### Wow.

Great inspirational stuff. THanks for posting again.

### Important problems

I saw this talk a few years ago and this part really stuck with me:

[...] And I started asking, What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!

While it doesn't seem like a good idea to go around questioning peoples' research in that way (it doesn't seem to give you many friends!), it certainly is a good thing to ask yourself once in a while: "am I working on an important problem of my field? if not, why not?"

### Knuth's take on "important problems"

To lift a quote from All Questions Answered (TUGboat, Volume 23 (2002), No. 3/4):
So my basic idea is to say, whoever you are, youâ€™ve got a unique combination of talents thatâ€™s been given to you. Donâ€™t decide . . . Your life is kind of like a binary search, you try things and find out you did well in this, you try other things, you find out you didnâ€™t do so well in that, you go on and continue discovering what are the best ways to use the abilities that you were born with instead of what you think they ought to have been.

### Hamming wrote a book on this topic

Hamming wrote a book that goes deeper into the topic of his talk: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1997. Very highly recommended.

### Also inspirational in person

It was never my privilege to meet Dick Hamming, but an older colleague once described his experience working down the hall. This man (my colleague) was a strong software engineer, but was not a researcher or a scientist. As best I can reconstruct it:

Dick would come wandering down the hall, step into my office, and write enthusiastically on my whiteboard, explaining all the while what it was he was thinking about. I would nod and say "hmm" at various points, mostly not understanding a word of it. It was quite an amazing experience.

And judging by my colleagues tone during his description, it was perhaps awe-inspiring and a bit frightening in a low-grade sort of way. From the description I got, Hamming was probably explaining the foundations of error correcting codes.

John Cocke behaved similarly, though his soliloquies generally included a fair bit of colorful vocabulary. Most people found him intimidating, but I think that John may have loved nothing more than a well-founded, knock-down, drag-out, bare-knuckles technical argument. Ignorance was tolerated if corrected, but stupidity was like waving a flag before a bull: you were sure to be gored.