Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming
Richard Wesley Hammingwas an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code, the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing, and the Hamming distance...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth11 February 1915
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
law data justified
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.
success believe thinking
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.
small-problems errors tree
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.
research aphorism used
Beware of finding what you're looking for. A favorite aphorism he often used.
sports interesting intellectual
Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.
knowledge answers may
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.
engineering doing-you states
Put glibly: In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.
feet computer scientist
Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.
greatness names letters
True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.
hard-work different way
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.
hard-work doors important
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.
believe airplane differences
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.
inspirational thinking creative
The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.
successful scientist characteristics
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.