The emotion at the point of technical breakthrough is better than wine, women and song put together.
Interpretation
The joy of achieving a significant technical innovation surpasses the pleasures of life.
Richard Hamming emphasizes that the emotional high experienced during a groundbreaking moment in technology is unparalleled and greater than any worldly pleasures, such as food, companionship, or music. This quote highlights the profound satisfaction and excitement that come from intellectual achievements and innovation.
In practice
A speaker at a tech conference highlighting the thrill of innovation.
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.
You may look through the streets of heaven, asking each how they came to b there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a person who is morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle.
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination.
We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.
Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
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