Hamming Quotes

#1. I've been accused of deliberately hamming up my accent and dropping letters, but that's just how I speak - I used to be a chav.

Kate Nash

#2. It is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts hamming it up.

P.G. Wodehouse

#3. I was hamming it up so much you could virtually taste the salad too.

Storm Constantine

#4. 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.

Richard Hamming

#5. Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.

Richard Hamming

#6. 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 often poorly stated economic and practical objectives.

Richard Hamming

#7. In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are responsible for what you believe.

Richard Hamming

#8. Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.

Richard Hamming

#9. Typing is no substitute for thinking.

Richard Hamming

#10. If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.

Richard Hamming

#11. There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.

Richard Hamming

#12. 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 ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on.

Richard Hamming

#13. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

Richard Hamming

#14. 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.

Richard Hamming

#15. The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

Richard Hamming

#16. 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 thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

Richard Hamming

#17. What you learn from others you can use to follow.
What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.

Richard Hamming

#18. The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you're doing.

Richard Hamming

#19. Good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system.

Richard Hamming

#20. 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.

Richard Hamming

#21. The emotion at the point of technical breakthrough is better than wine, women and song put together.

Richard Hamming

#22. 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.

Richard Hamming

#23. 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.

Richard Hamming

#24. Luck favors the prepared mind.

Richard Hamming

#25. 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 a large effect, then since I do not know what I am doing how would I dare act on the conclusions drawn?

Richard Hamming

#26. 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.

Richard Hamming

#27. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.

Richard Hamming

#28. Newton said, 'If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.' These days we stand on each other's feet!

Richard Hamming

#29. The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Richard Hamming

#30. Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.

Richard Hamming

#31. True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier - when it's spelled with a lower case letter.

Richard Hamming

#32. If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

Richard Hamming

#33. Beware of finding what you're looking for.
[A favorite aphorism he often used.]

Richard Hamming

#34. What are the important problems of your field?

Richard Hamming

#35. It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.

Richard Hamming

#36. 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.

Richard Hamming

#37. Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.

Richard Hamming

#38. The real problem is what can man and machine do together and not in competition.

Richard Hamming