Richard Hamming Quotes

33 quotes in 588 categories

• Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.
• 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…
• If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.
• 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…
• Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead;…
• True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.
• Science is concerned with what is possible while engineering is concerned with choosing, from among the many possible ways, one that meets a number of…
• 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…
• Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• If the prior distribution, at which I am frankly guessing, has little or no effect on the result, then why bother; and if it has…
• Luck favors the prepared mind.
• What are the important problems of your field?

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