Richard Hamming

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.

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.

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.

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

Beware of finding what you're looking for._x000D_ _x000D_ A favorite aphorism he often used.

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.

Put glibly:_x000D_ _x000D_ In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it._x000D_ _x000D_ In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it._x000D_ _x000D_ Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.

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".

The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.

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.

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

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.