Quotes from Richard Hamming

If you will only ask yourself, "Is what I am being told really true?," it is amazing how much you can find is, or borders on, being false, even in a well-developed field!

my boss was saying intellectual investment is like compound interest: the more you do, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. I do not know what compound interest rate to assign, but it must be well over 6%—one extra hour per day over a lifetime will much more than double the total output. The steady application of a bit more effort has a great total accumulation.

computers are now often an essential component of a good design.

computers have given top management the power to micromanage their organization, and top management has shown little or no ability to resist using this power. You can regularly read in the papers some big corporation is decentralizing, but when you follow it for several years you see they merely intended to do so, but did not.

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

Very few of us in our saner moments believe that the particular postulates that some logicians have dreamed up create the numbers - no, most of us believe that the real numbers are simply there and that it has been an interesting, amusing, and important game to try to find a nice set of postulates to account for them.

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

To see the obvious it often takes an outsider, or else someone like me who is thoughtful and wonders what he is doing and why it is all necessary. Even when told, the old timers will persist in the ways they learned, probably out of pride for their past and an unwillingness to admit there are better ways than those they were using for so long.

Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do." The evidence for this is, unfortunately, all too good. It has been said in physics no creator of any significant thing ever understood what he had done.

From these early attempts to explain things slowly came philosophy as well as our present science. Not that science explains "why" things are as they are - gravitation does not explain why things fall - but science gives so many details of "how" that we have the feeling we understand "why." Let us be clear about this point; it is by the sea of interrelated details that science seems to say "why" the universe is as it is.

The Buddha told his disciples, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." I say the same to you—you must assume the responsibility for what you believe.

In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen?

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Newton said, "If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants." These days we stand on each other's feet!

True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.

It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.

Beware of finding what you're lookin

If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.

Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.

The emotion at the point of technical breakthrough is better than wine, women and song put together.

Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.

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.

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 don't quite know what problems are worth working on.

The real problem is what can man and machine do together and not in competition.