Richard Hamming Quotes

Mathematicians stand on each others’ shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others’ toes.

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.

Computer scientists stand on each other’s feet.

You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don’t mind. But to yourself try to be honest.

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.

Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity. I don`t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.

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

In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are responsible for what you believe.

Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.

There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.

Beware of finding what you’re looking for.
A favorite aphorism he often used.