Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming
Richard Wesley Hammingwas an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code, the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing, and the Hamming distance...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth11 February 1915
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
guessing littles results
If the prior distribution, at which I am frankly guessing, has little or no effect on the result, then why bother; and if it has a large effect, then since I do not know what I am doing how would I dare act on the conclusions drawn?
teacher doors apples
Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.
use
What you learn from others you can use to follow. What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.
greatness names letters
True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.
engineering doing-you states
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.
knowledge answers may
It may be said "In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it." In a sense, if the answer turns out to be exactly what you expected, then you have learned nothing new, although you may have had your confidence increased somewhat.
research aphorism used
Beware of finding what you're looking for. A favorite aphorism he often used.
small-problems errors tree
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.
success believe thinking
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.
feet computer scientist
Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.
teacher thinking class
Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture. For example, in education, a teacher might say in the next class he was going to "explain Young's modulus and how to measure it," rather than, "I am going to educate the students and prepare them for their future careers".
important example why-not
Often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, "But of course, this is what it is" and got an important result.
science thinking people
There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.
years doors office
If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you dont quite know what problems are worth working on.