Hamming, "You and Your Research" (June 6, 1995)

well this is the last lecture of the course because the next two meetings nominally I will be at Los Alamos giving a talk at a symposium there this talk is you and your research I've given it many times it might as well be call you and your engineering career or even you and your career in the discussions afterwards for this talk many times discussions of reddit these are broad principles of success in many fields so while I will talk about research because that's why I've studied it's really fairly broadly based I've told you earlier about my career but I'll remind you at Los Alamos I became aware that I was a janitor of science some of the persons people who keep the thing going but whose opinion is not matter a great deal they could trust me do simple things but the major decisions I was not really involved in and to put it bluntly and unpleasantly I was envious plain envious I began to ask myself what's the difference between the really capable scientists myself and I study the work to Bell Labs I said it further this is really a report on what I found differently the first class and the second class I want to remind you something which is not in the notes what is called the Matthew effect named after Saint Matthew there is a verse there in the Bible which says under those who have shall be given on those who have not should be taken away or put a bloody those with God gets and those what haven't got it you know what happens it's true in science when you become famous it's easy to remain famous for example once I became moderately famous I was invited to give talks to IBM and so on come on went there they would show me this without that's going on show me the research labs or production lines and so on so I got to know more information the other person once famous it's very easy remain famous once not famous and what you do do will be taken away from you so it's necessary to do something outstanding otherwise what you do is sort of taken away from you as Saint Matthew said now why do I believe it's important to talk because as far as I know and as far as you know you have one life to lead you might as well lead a life you would like to have and I suggest you a life of doing something significant by your definition of Steve it is worthwhile to live a life which you got by in the back and you say well I didn't do it your arm is not terribly satisfactory so I am really trying to get you to think about doing significant things by your definition of significant now I have to talk about my own experience I have throughout the course because if I talk of all the peoples it doesn't have the effect my premise is to stick a knife in your back and give it a good twist and make you say it back end of having to do it why couldn't I after all you got that much better than I am is doubtful he is better than you are so my purpose in telling direct stories is to make you conscious but you can be at least as great or better than I was and I didn't do badly now I'll start psychological rather logically the first objection people have is well Fame as a matter of luck I have cited regularly pastors remarked luck favors the prepared mind yes there is an Elmo block no there isn't for example when I stretch firemen he was running in computing I brought in to help get him out so he go back to physics ah I knew he'd get a Nobel Prize for something he was one of the people we've seen the banner and energy and ability and he was going to do something it was in the nature of him to be something well yes luck very prepared mine but also it says you prepare yourself and then look at you but there's lots of ways luck and hit you for example when I went to Bell Laboratories the first time first months I was there Shannon a lady Miss Sally Mead and myself share a very big room in the Attic Shannon went on to create information theory I created coding theory there were a large amount of people around yes it was in the air but why did we do it why was it us Shannon had done all the good things before them he is master's thesis had observed that boolean algebra is what you need for switching circuits he had made a number of very significant contributions on Stein as famous for writing five papers in one year in a journal several which are very great classics it isn't luck it is - I gotta say both it is and it is not you prepare yourself our way you lead from day to day will it lead your life from day to day you prepare yourself for success or you don't and when the lightning strikes you either ready or you're not it misses you or it hits you what will be is open to debate but I think the sheriff had not created information theory would have done other significant things he'd done a bunch before he would do ones afterwards so I sort of deny it it's at least I deny this all luck now Newton observed Sir Isaac Newton that if other people thought as hard as he did they would get the same results and Edison said genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration I tell you the same thing to a great extent it is constant hard work that does it nothing more and nothing less the very able people work very hard all the time at Los Alamos on Sundays when we goofed off a little bit what he went on hiking in the mountains behind Los Alamos they still talk shop they were at the problem all the time now I'm one of the characteristics but not always is it one young they showed a great deal of ability Newton did not as far as I'd make out really biographies he really didn't look unusual to anybody until after he came up to Cambridge in college and his mathematical knowledge was about arithmetic when he came he's an exception and a few other now Einstein consider the fact that after he got his doctor's degree he had no legitimate job except for seven years in the Patent Office no job of the university he didn't get early recognition but he got it he did it and that indicates that the IQs or such other things which people are supposed to have it's a help but quite a few great people don't have fabulously high IQs as measured by the normal methods Einstein certainly did not look like a good student grab the other people didn't a personal example he's dead now so I can tell you a guy named Bill fan walked to my office at Bell Labs and he want to do Sol melting now zone melting you have a bar you have a coil around it which you heat by adduction to melt the metal and you move it down slowly if the impurities stay in solution you drag the impurities down if impurities trying to drop out they're pushed the other side and many many passes remove the impurities from the middle of bar well he has some equations I put some algebra on it and some calculus - got some partial answers but I can see that he needed computing well I went around to his department and asked about him well they didn't think much of them I'll go back to my office I thought he had a good idea I had resolved to work with important people I want to do important work work with important people here was my chance to contribute to a really good idea if it were good but his department didn't think much of them but I reflected Mohammed had to leave town flee for his life a prophet is without honor in his own country remember it will be often true that your local people cannot see that you are doing great work I conclude I would help I taught him how to use the machine I made machine time available to him and so on and well he picked up all kinds of prizes he became a famous man his laboratory was made a national treasure one time also along the way from being inarticulate and knowing little mathematics and lacking confidence he became a man who spoke clearly and well at gain confidence he had lacked confidence when he was young and that success Curzon Mellon was his one great idea but it was what Bell Labs needed and whatever else needed we needed to be make able we needed to be able to make germanium without very many impurities then we needed to be able to put as many watt in because if you now take the same zone and drag it down you can drag down impurities about the density you want in them you have remarkable control with zone melting now you make a thousand passes or something that's why you can't do it numerically other than with a computing machine because the thousand pastor to have end effects and they bounced around so I was right that time I guess the man has something important I worked with him and I was part of something new it was important now having disposed of psychological objections of luck and lack of high IQ because some of you say well I was the brightest student or class so what doesn't matter let's get down to other things now the most important thing probably great people is they believe they can do great work they have confidence in themselves if you don't think you do good work it's not likely that you're ever going to do it it's that simple now you can be too overconfident but you should have a fair amount of confidence take for example chemin you remember where I did the information today I point out how when stuck with random codes he averaged over all random codes and showed the average was arbitrarily good therefore one good code had to exist who but a man with almost infinite courage would do that he had her now I'll tell you another way simply there was a year so when he came in about ten o'clock played chess about 2:00 and went home at the end of year the company gave me a salary raise that's all you could see were doing was that but at home he was creating information to him well the way he played chess is the following when you are attacking chess you wouldn't either defend yourself or you attack back Shannen never defended himself attacked back and the game would get tied up more more more more complex and finally his stop and think for a long while grabbed his Queen advances said is scared nuttin bingo the whole game would collapse them because he finally precipitated all pending operations and either won or lost well I learned that expression I ain't scared nothing I've used this several times of myself one stuck and I didn't know what on earth to do I said good nefesh n good enough for having is scared nothing let's go ahead and see what happens and sometimes by copying his style I came through the success I deliberately copied his style now another example I hope most people are dead to guests the art but they won't hear this I was in a math department and the math department we used to go to lunch together they played games threw boomerangs flew kites and played this and that and they fiddle around and I want to succeed as I can't afford to waste lunch times so I went around to the physics table where I'd written a paper with one the physicists a good one that said may I join you sure I'm welcome the table consists among other people of Bardeen Shockley and Bratton's and nobel prize winners JB Johnson Johnson noise and some others by friend Louis and I choose to have lunch with him for years I learned a lot I learned a lot of tricks out of Shockley how he did things I watched other people I learned how to do things sensibly well finally the Nobel Prize came through promotion came through jobs elsewhere came through and all the able people left including my friend he is from old up line well what was left was the drakes hardly worthy English with but over in another corner dining room was a big table chemische and I had written a paper on nuclear Baghdad residence with one of the guys and so I said you mind if I join you so I sit down and we talk about chemistry and such other things for a long while and finally one day I walk in to say if what you're working on is not important and it's not likely to lead to important things why are you working on it after that with the engineers that was spring in the fall going down the long corridor Bell Labs my friend chemists stopped me and said you know having that remark of yours got any thighs skin I've spent the summer thinking about the important problems my field I have not changed my research but I think it was well worth the time I say thank you Dave and walk on about two weeks later I knows he's made head of the department about ten or twelve years ago i knows he is a member National Academy of Engineering I have never heard of anything about any other person path chemistry table not one the one man who could hear if what you were doing is not important not liking important why are you doing the one man who could did become important he did succeed the rest him who couldn't hear didn't it's that simple if you don't work on important problems you are not going to do important things except by the dumbest of dumb luck you must work on important problems too now you can't work on all the time because that's what Nobel Prize winners do they get a Nobel Prize anything like Shannon also they can only work on important problems as a result they don't do anything you have to plant little acorns which grow into my a oak trees but you have to plant the acorns which will grow you have to learn the small things so the great thing great thing wrong with Nobel Prizes is you now think you only work on important problems you don't what you have to work on a problem which can become important and matter which have a future which will grow into mighty oak trees another thing that ruins Nobel Prize when it of course is everybody gets famous you're putting all kinds of committees all kinds of other things and you can't get any work done they stop you from doing it by various promotions to so on so that's a lot of reason why Nobel Prize winners often don't do very much afterwards now conferencing yourself I said is important over Coppins of course is a disaster I'll put as I did the other day the difference between being strong-willed and stubborn there being confident overconfidence about the same thing it's just fine line I've seen a lot of people abandon a good idea too soon and I've seen people cling to a bad idea too long they're both difficult problems now one of the features which you can cling do regularly is a desire to do excellent work whatever you do you're going to do well now it's not true my father said anything worth doing all is worth doing well there are some things you might have to get rid of like you have to sign some paper for this or that you just sign them you don't try and write your handwriting your most beautiful one you can just get rid of it but in general you try and do excellence this the one guide I think you can say whatever I do I am going to do well and that will give you some unity because I've talked to you before about the drunken sailor who staggered a couple steps this way and a couple this way and a couple this way in a total of many many steps he gets the distance to square root of n but if there's a pretty girl over there he staggered like this nice I go like this they get the distance proportional then when you have a vision you will go a long way without evasion what you're going to do where you're going to be you're not going to get very far it's that simple you have to get a vision of what you are going to do and be and then pursue it an excellence is one of the best tracks you could use I am going to do things very well I'm going to do more than just a good job I'm going to a first-class job now what you may consider good working relations may not be for you it's very sad but what do you think are good working dishes are not the example I've given you already is working with the door closed door opening if you work the door closed you won't be interrupted you get your work done you work your door open people come by and stop and chat and so on so on but I've noticed very clearly at Bell Laboratories those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don't know what to work on they are not connected with reality those who have the door open may very well know what's important now I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door Isis if ik suspected bill I can only establish the correlation and it was quite spectacular almost always the guy with the door closed were often very well able very gifted but they seem to work always on slightly the wrong problem so you'll have to get wide feeling for what is going on and the supreme example of this closure is the Institute for Advanced Study in person they take in people who've done something great they give them luxury a beautiful office a beautiful restaurant to dine in a wonderful grounds and everything else like that adequate salary to live on no cares no worries no nothing you're freed for life on anything at all what happens the baulkham continue working on the problem they made that made them famous they keep on elaborating and so on ah they've already made it famous it does not be attitude they got thing going rarely do they change now von Neumann was different he was the Institute and he did go out in reality and turn up in Washington in other places he traveled widely and was receptive of new ideas but the bulk of the people got a point the Institute for Advanced Study don't keep the door open on life as it were and they don't do anything comparable to what they had done before there are very able people but the Institute in my opinion sterilized it a great extent so what do you think is the ideal working dishes are not now I'll give you some examples of this when we began with the IBM 701 computer we programmed in absolute binary and there were a bunch of these machines at a West Coast airframe companies and the rest were scattered around now we became obvious to me that the weather the West Coast used for programming namely we hire urk an acre of girls spread out and they program typically girls but sometimes men but mainly they were programming girls in those days what was clear to me Bell Labs would never give me an acre of girls they weren't about doing that kind of a thing well what do I do I mean computing I want to be in the frontier what everybody else has I'm not going to have well I could quit get a job on the west coast probably anyone in the remember airframes companies could I was will use me no one out there but Bell Labs had a lot of very good people and the airframe companies have a few good people scattered widely but not a high density remember about trying to learn how to be great so I'm studying great people Bell Labs places study let the airframe of the place were to get a tool so I think for a long while one day I said myself Hamming you believe a machine can do anything why don't you make the machine do the programming well what is it cause the net effect was that I was put immediately right in the frontier of programming how do I make the Machine you do the programming force what appeared to be a defect by turning the problem around became an asset Grace Hopper has told us of all the stories a similar way what appears to be a defect is NASA so frequently when you think things are wrong and you haven't got the met wherewithal to do it if you turn the problem around you can turn to the great success another one is slightly different when I was doing this xx order system equation I told you about the Navy intercept plane I was solving it on a digital machine because the analog machine outside of Philadelphia couldn't do the job no analogues out machinae that they could do it because they didn't have the required accuracy well I was using a variation of Mills method which was pretty crummy I'd had found Mills method was unstable had patched up a little bit there was one day I realized the following I was going to have to fill in a report of what I did because government contracts always require reports and everybody who had analog computer was going to try and pick flaws and what I did because I was really showing that a digital machine could beat the analog on his own home ground that's really what I was doing not getting the answer a problem I was really demonstrating something much more important well I promptly started deriving a better method of integrating the differential equations and I finally use method which is for some years was known as Hammonds method I don't recommend it now but it was very suitable for the machines as they were and so I had the girl programmer change a few of the instructions running trajectory once more to check the new program got the same as the old answers and then what I had this report has a very jazzy method of solving differential equations it's at a very crumbing method both are equally effective but one was defensible and one was not you see I changed the nation problem I saw that the problem although originally was get the answers of these trajectories in fact it was something else it was proving that a digital machine could beat the analog machine on his own home ground of differential equations I redefine the problem and made his success I would not have found having method if I had not realized that the method I were using which was adequate for me and we go all see we're getting right answer but it was not nice was not cleaned as simple is rather ugly so I changed the problem now these are all tell you issues you want are seldom realized but that you can change the conditions that you have to make success either by inverting the problem or as I told you a second story changing the nature problem recognizing the underlying real problem now that's something I've done several times there's one very early problem I Solv spectacular I computed one of you but from a physics point of view the value in the transistor research was extremely valuable well I meditated over why was that successful I studied it over and over again and I believe this statement you should study your successes you don't study your failures study successes because when your time comes you will know how to succeed if you study failures you'll know how to fail so study success very closely down to yours but other people's why did Galileo do what he did how did Newton do it try as best you can do study other people how they succeed what were the elements of their success which elements of that can you adapt to your personality you can't be everybody but you have to find your own method and studying success is a very good way of forming your own style now one day I think I've told you a story before Alba repeated one day I found John to be with whom I working extensively was my age and the guy was clearly a genius I went in my our mutual boss and says Hendrick how can anybody my age no so much as John Tukey does well he leaned back in his chair grinned at me and said Hamming you'd be surprised how much you know if you worked as hard as he did i slunk out the officer wasn't anything to say and I stayed home when I was home I thought frankly I am not working really as hard as I could I'll ever be able to work as hard as John does I haven't got the psychic energy but I can work a hell on hard I have been let me reorganize my life let me quit spending my time and reading nonsense magazines and thumbing through newspaper they're not very important by career let's spend my time studying things in my career for example I got appointed deliberately a book review editor therefore for there's always a book on my coffee table right next to waiting to be read and review written when review is written by me I set aside where we can ask myself afterwards is that a good review does that read I guess the book if it doesn't you're rereading the book or writing a better review this way I forced myself to get a lot wide acquaintance in computer science and being a book review editor I got to review the books I wanted this was a device now it's true I quit reading New Yorker I quit reading magazines like what rue godmother thing my wife complain occasionally all I looked New York was the jokes she was right I didn't have time to do everything I wasn't a first-class genius I had to work hard so I simply set aside other things and did that it's not hard to do you just do it now I want to say another couple things the race is not to the swiftest the guy who works hardest doesn't win the person who works on the right problem at the right time in the right way is what counts and nothing else that's what I'm trying to do in this whole course I can try and teach you something about style and taste so you'll be able to have some hunch of when the problem is ripe what problem is ripe and how to go about it the right problem at the right time the right way we counts and nothing else counts nothing you God do that but it's easy there's a million races being run you just got to get in one time and win now I met you earlier regard to the chemists about one of the important problems in your field at the urging of some other people partly and partly in my own I used to set aside Friday noon and Friday afternoon for great thoughts meaning yes I'll answer telephone yes I'll sign a paper but mainly what is the effect of computing on science what the hell am i doing is computing machine how is it going to affect AT&T what should I be doing in computing what is the nature of software my friends all after a while got to know Friday afternoons great thoughts what's the nature of this that the other thing I spent 10 percent of my time trying to answer the question what are the important problems of I feel 10 percent Friday afternoon straight through don't do it Monday morning because you'll be interrupted immediately if you do it Friday afternoon somebody can linger around the Saturday in the sun degree you do it Monday morning there's a hot conference at 10 o'clock and bingo everything's broken up I use it Friday afternoon for many many years I recommend it you find a regular time to stop and think what are the important things what is going on what is the nature of what you are doing what is the characteristic of the job what are the fundamentals behind it so you'll have some idea of where you're headed so you can march in a uniform direction and get far rather being a drunken sailor and getting nowhere and I've regular to this picture tried to stress this lecture stress the bigger picture I've tried to stress fundamentals no one knows what the fundamentals will be tomorrow but you can try to ask what are the fundamentals the things about which other things seem to depend and those things which seem to be true tomorrow but maybe not I've also stressed a necessity of learning new things all kinds of new fields come up endlessly you're going to keep on coming up you have to get some grip on them you can't learn them all but you have to get idea well that is relevant to my field that's interesting but it isn't relevant forget it it's a very difficult problem to do now the another thing I have to talk about great people it took me a long long while to discover this after I've been studying I'd say 15 or 20 years before I realized that tolerance of ambiguity they both believe and disbelieve now most people want to believe something is true or it isn't true great scientists believe the theory is true enough so they continue working because if you a theory is true you won't but they just believed enough to notice what's wrong and make the big change to the new theory if you believe the theory is right you won't make the big change to the next new theory you won't make the big step forward you'll merely elaborate and extend the old theory and that won't make you a great scientist they'll make you just a good witch I'm not complaining about but greatness is consists of seeing whether people have missed and seizing bound the contradictions and making the new step forward you have to tolerate ambiguity I have not the faintest idea how I'll ever teach a course in ambiguity I've thought about many times how I put a course together to teach students to tolerate ambiguity I haven't a clue so I don't know what to do I really tell you that the tolerance of ambiguity not being so certain everything is correct is a necessary feature now most great scientists have 10 to 20 problems in their minds want you to hanging around which when they get a clue how to attack they drop other things and bless you that problem finish it off first something between 10 and 20 problems which they think import but you don't know what to do now let me warn you about important problems importance is not the consequences all the time hours at Bell Labs no one worked on the three outstanding problems in physics time travel teleportation and anti-gravity they're not important because you haven't gotten attack the importance of a problem to a great extent depends upon have you got a way of attacking the problem problems are not important per se although they have some consequences the most important thing that makes a problem portent is that there is an attack you have an idea how I can go about that problem you want to watch it just because the economic consequences are great and take those three of them anti-gravity teleportation or time travel the economic consequences are unbelievably large but they're not important problems you have an idea how to do it when you have then they may become important now I've been quite a few times I would practically saying the following it is not what you do it's the way that you do it it's a style you go about doing things it's inverting the proper changing in the words of the song it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it it's a style of what you do it it makes the difference you only look at special relativity Punk or a hat at all said well the people had it all before but I assigned it the right way and you only remember Einstein of having done special relativity the other guys had it all they even give talks on but they hadn't screwed up to subject it didn't have it really clear and straightforward now when you first do a thing is often muddled up and one of your problems is to get it clear so it can be communicated to other people and you've spent a lot of time lying in bed saying well gee how can I say that to Joe if I try it this way Jill might never misunderstand that how about that how about this until you finally have a way of looking the problem which looks simple straightforward and clear so you can communicate it to others it may not be the way you found it often is not but getting it clear is important which brings me to the topic of communication you need to learn to communicate orally it talks like this written and reports and casual conversations in the middle of a conference you have to be able to go up to say that's wrong for these reasons Bing Bing Bing Bing and you win if you sit around and say well all right report tomorrow after I've thought about some more the decision is made we go ahead and it doesn't matter what you do then the ability communicated three levels how do you learn it you can read books if you want to but forget it the way you learn as far as I'm concerned is every time you go to a talk you listen not only to talk but to the style that's done what talks are effective why were they effective what aspects of the speaker can you adapt for example in your if you're going to give after-dinner speeches generally speaking there are three jokes one the beginning when you get up one the middle to keep awake and one last one solo remember something that you said well I had to learn jokes I discovered that I cannot tell shaggy dog stories I can tell what liner is very well but I couldn't I had to adapt my joke-telling to what I could do those who told shaggy dog stories variously by simply cannot do it very well you have to adapt what you learn for other speakers to you when you find a person was very effective doing something can you do it why not maybe you can't then you have to something else but if you the self will learn to criticize other talks then you will have a critical basis to correct criticize your own and then you'll be able to give your talks if you can only follow up books say this out learning your own style of creativity it is going to work so I think that the best thing you could do is start as of tomorrow when you hear lectures and talks ask yourself every time besides what was a Content what was the style what part can I adapt that technique why is that speech effective why is that a speech not effective and you can ask your friends to check that your opinions are somewhat the same way there is you may find sometimes they don't agree with you what's effective talk it's a bit of a problem there now it's a poor workman who blames his tools I've always trapped adopted philosophy I will do the best I can with what I got thus this school has got a great many faults bureaucracy in Washington period as strange things other things the students have peculiar features they have to disappear now and then well you don't blame the system you do at each course and each lecture the best you can given the circumstances this course is suffered from the fact is being broadcast so you all been intimidated afraid this razor has a Hamming I think you're crazy what about such-and-such the fall of this course with the television on is that you people been too intimidated well I'll do the best I can I knew I perfectly well I couldn't get you to interact very actively in the class so I gave up on that one though I did get you one class lecture now there's another thing you have to recognize if you're going to have progress there has to be change change does not mean progress but progress requires change most people and most institutions don't like change they resent it and therefore in order to make progress you have to sort of welcome change you have to embrace it in spite the fact you don't like it why with all of you do you say it perfectly alright now why should I be change in adopt the model I did if the department has been doing this for 10 years the same way it's time you should change to find out how to do it some other way I know it's perfectly satisfactory forget it there might be better weapons you'll never find out who you stay in the same damn rut needless to say most apartments Bell Labs didn't like my model but that was my model all the time if you were doing for same thing for a long while why is there no other method of doing it better you will never find other methods if you don't try other things some of the ones will make them worse occasionally but without change you will not have progress now when you're learning things I told you you need to put hooks on ideas so they can recover widely that was the thing that John to do and I couldn't for so long he could dredge up almost any kind of information after he told me I could see the what he said was true but I couldn't think of it first so I started doing it heated where I got new piece of information I turned it around many ways until is it worth it was connected with many piece of information so that in various situations that would come available and it has worked out fairly well now you're likely to say to yourself you have enough readable work I did neither one began I had to do more less with respect when you hire a plumber to fix the plumbing you expect them do you already trained do you expect to be able you don't give a person or big lovely chance to do something great when they that already demonstrated greatness the onus is on you to demonstrate greatness and then you'll get the opportunities it's not the other way around beautifully put by a instructor when I was at Nebraska the instructor went ahead Department said I want to be relieved as some teaching so I do some research ahead Department said when you've done the research I'll relieve you they teach you you have to demonstrate your ability first and then you'll have the freedom to do it otherwise no I had to do error correcting codes at home on my own time after I became more able Maggie left me alone in fact the backend management clearly had to believe the more we left having alone the more he'd worry about what should be done more like he's going to do the right thing that I applied to a guy like Hamming who had a conscience and was worried it doesn't apply to some people some people you give him freedom they'll do nothing but I was compulsive and I was really about doing the right job so I did now I have to ask the question is effort to be a great person worth it now great isn't by definition of what you think is great not mine is it worth it I will claim yes I've talked to various people now people who tried to succeed and didn't I was afraid to ask but those who didn't succeed and we're famous I asked who was the struggle worth and I said yep it's better than wine women and song put together I didn't ask any women they might had better wine men in song I don't know but they all thought that doing something really first-class and knowing you've done it is better than anything else they could think of I can't give you a report of the guys who didn't do it as I said I was afraid to ask I didn't want to embarrass them well let me come down now to a saying of Socrates who lived off 470 to 399 BC and Greece he said the unexamined life is not worth living I heard it while I was crossed first time I heard while crossing the campus at Yale behind a professor and a student for us to turn the student again said the unexamined life is not worth living and before request the whole quad he incited three times the unexamined life is not worth living you should examine your life you've only got one life two lead as far as any of us know why should it be the life you want to heaven instead of whatever happens to you to come down the back and say well I didn't do any harm I had an enjoyable life is that what you want to say your old age you just had a good time in life or do you want to say you know I did something was important at least something that I thought was important that's your problem therefore I pick these things up and do it if you want to have a happy life in the back end now I think all these questions are style I kept saying several times you've got to work on the right problem at the right time in the right way otherwise you're doomed style is everything and is not communicable in words I cannot tell you what makes a great painting I can show you once I can show you success which I've done this class now in summer I is since I want to give you a different view of the whole course particularly this lecture I'm a revivalist preacher if you want I'm saying repent your idle ways and get down and be somebody worth being this is what this lecture is all about revivals preacher preaching well now I've told you things how to succeed no one ever told me these things I've been telling you nobody I had to find it for myself I've told you how to succeed you have no excuse for not doing better than I did thank and

Channel: securitylectures

Views: 165,109

Rating: 4.9746838 out of 5

Keywords: hamming

Id: a1zDuOPkMSw

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/SubCriticalAppraisal]

This lecture was originally delivered to graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in 1995. The lecture was the last in a capstone course taught by Richard Hamming (who invented Hamming code when he was working at Bell Labs after working at the Manhattan Project) called "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering".

The first lecture was actually "Learning to Learn", the transcript of which is at least as widely-circulated as that of "You and Your Research". The whole lecture series is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

The lecture series was adapted into a book of the same name. The chapters/lectures I found the most insightful are "Learning to Learn", "Creativity", "Experts", "Unreliable Data", "You Get What You Measure", and "You and Your Research". The bulk of chapters/lectures on Maths/Computer Science/AI are a bit outdated.

You can read the PDF for free from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf

If you have money and you can buy a republished hardcopy from Stripe: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Learning/dp/1732265178

Edit: The famous Hamming question goes, "What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on them?"

[u/-Metacelsus-]

Wow! I remember the transcript but I didn't know the video was available.

[u/dabderax]

Any additional info?

[u/parakramshekhawat]

This post took off, lol. I'd suggest listening to the lectures and thinking hard about them over reading the book. Stripe press did an amazing job by the looks of it but the lectures despite being longer are significantly better and go into great detail that you just won't find in the book.

Go forth and do great work! The gods are with you.

[u/great_waldini]

Thank you so much for sharing this. This was my first exposure to this series, and anything at all directly from Hamming himself. While I’d heard the name in association with this or that, I didn’t realize he had left us such treasure. So thank you! I look gleefully forward to the rest of the series