"You and Your Research," Richard Hamming (1986) [idea clutch]
Doing great work
Riddle for you: what would make a fiction-loving Art History major like me consistently revisit a talk delivered to a bunch of researchers and computer scientists in 1986?
Answer: Richard Hamming delivering “You And Your Research,” a lecture about doing great work, and what the great scientists he worked alongside or studied had in common.
If you want the flutter of ambition in your belly today, or any day, I would recommend reading this transcript of Hamming’s lecture in full. I’ve written a summary of his guidance, through quotes, below. To give you a better sense of the guy, I also included my favorite picture of Hamming in his favorite red plaid jacket.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.''
Dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you do great work or not… Newton said, ``If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.''
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.
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. Early recognition... seems to sterilize you.
What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad.
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 - it is very much like compound interest.
Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well… If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started.
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work… You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen.
I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. 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 should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative.
It is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling'
Look for the positive side of things instead of the negative.
More to buzz about
Many of us who work in tech were first introduced to Hamming when Paul Graham posted a transcript of his talk on his website. He’s is a mathematician most famous for his work at Bell Labs on error detecting and error codes (for which he won a Turing Award in 1968). Hamming spent the later years of his career as a lecturer in the computer science department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and was teaching within weeks of his death.
A video of Hamming delivering his talk, if you want to get a sense for the main and the voice and the mannerisms of the man behind these words
A beautiful bio of Hamming
More pictures of Hamming in plaid
