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Richard Hamming Quotes
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Richard Wesley Hamming was 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.

Born in Chicago, Hamming attended University of Chicago, University of Nebraska and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in mathematics under the supervision of Waldemar Trjitzinsky . In April 1945 he joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. He left to join the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946. Over the next fifteen years he was involved in nearly all of the Laboratories' most prominent achievements.

After retiring from the Bell Labs in 1976, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he worked as an adjunct professor and senior lecturer in computer science, and devoted himself to teaching and writing books. He delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before he died from a heart attack on January 7, 1998. Wikipedia  

✵ 11. February 1915 – 7. January 1998
Richard Hamming: 90   quotes 1   like

Richard Hamming Quotes

“Most mathematics books are filled with finished theorems and polished proofs, and to a surprising extent they ignore the methods used to create mathematics. It is as if you merely walked through a picture gallery and never told how to mix paints, how to compose pictures, or all the other "tricks of the trade."”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Books , Mathematics , Painting

“Although textbooks (and professors) like to make definite statements indicating that they know what they are talking about, there is in fact a great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity in the world. …we will not evade this question but rather explore (overexplore?) it. …great progress is often made when what was long believed to be true is now seen to be perhaps not the whole truth. Thus the text often uses words… to cause you to think about the uncertainess and even the arbitrariness of much of our current conventions and definitions, to ponder about your acceptance of them.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Truth , World , Question , Thinking

“Unfortunately… the ADA language was designed by experts, and it shows all the non-humane features you can expect from them. It is… a typical Computer Science hacking job—do not try and understand what you are doing, just get it running. As a result of this poor psychological design… although a government contract may specify the programming be in ADA, probably over 90% will be done in FORTRAN, debugged, tested, and then painfully, by hand, be converted to a poor ADA program, with a high probability of errors!”

Richard Hamming

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Error , Understanding , Science

“Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?”

Richard Hamming

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1980)

Dogs , Way , Thinking , Light

“Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past.”

Richard Hamming

Preface
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Teachers , Past , Future

“The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics , Knowledge , Learning

“Faced with almost an infinity of details you cannot afford to deal constantly with the specific; you must learn to embrace more and more detail under the cover of generality.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Learning

“You live in an age that is dominated by science and engineering. …Thus if you wish to be effective in the world and to achieve the things that you want, it is necessary to understand both science and engineering”

Richard Hamming

and those require mathematics
Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Age , World , Mathematics , Understanding

“We are mainly interested in the processes… not… in presenting mathematics in its most abstract form. …we will often begin with concrete forms and then exhibit the process of abstraction.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics

“There are so many ways of being wrong and so few ways of being right that it is much more economical to study successes.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Way , Study , Success

“It is obvious: The past was once the future and the future will become the past.”

Richard Hamming

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Past , Future

“Great results in science and engineering are "bunched" in the same person too often for success to be a matter of random luck.”

Richard Hamming

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Science , Success , Personality

“The Postulates of Mathematics Were Not on the Stone Tablets that Moses Brought Down from Mt. Sinai.”

Richard Hamming

Emphatic capitalization in original.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1980)

Mathematics

“The beauty of mathematics often makes the subject matter much more attractive and easier to master.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Beauty , Mathematics

“Since I was trying to teach "style" of thinking in science and engineering, and "style" is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts—once the fundamentals have been learned. How to become a great painter cannot be taught in words… Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions… more or less as the points arise in the student's head—which is where learning is supposed to occur!”

Richard Hamming

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Art , Thinking , Learning , Teachers

“Any unwillingness to learn mathematics today can greatly restrict your possibilities tomorrow.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics , Learning

“The Buddha told his disciples, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense". I say the same to you—you must assume the responsibility for what you believe.”

Richard Hamming

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Sense , Reading

“Formal proofs, where there is deliberately no meaning, can convince only formalists, and of the results they themselves seem to deny any meaning. Is that to be the mathematics we are to use to understand the world we live in?”

Richard Hamming

Source: Mathematics on a Distant Planet (1998), p. 645

World , Mathematics , Understanding

“It is easy to measure your mastery of the results via a conventional examination; it is less easy to measure your mastery of doing mathematics, of creating new (to you) results, and of your ability to surmount the almost infinite details to see the general situation.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics