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
answers carefully change clear correct people problem reasonably refuse slightly until
If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.
math numbers purpose
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
hard-work important problem
If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.
mind luck favors
Luck favors the prepared mind.
successful scientist characteristics
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.
simple sheep effectiveness
I have tried, with little success, to get some of my friends to understand my amazement that the abstraction of integers for counting is both possible and useful. Is it not remarkable that 6 sheep plus 7 sheep makes 13 sheep; that 6 stones plus 7 stones make 13 stones? Is it not a miracle that the universe is so constructed that such a simple abstraction as a number is possible? To me this is one of the strongest examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Indeed, I find it both strange and unexplainable.
toes computer scientist
Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.
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?
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.
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.
hard-work different way
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.
hard-work doors important
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.