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Richard Hamming on Research

28 November 2003

I recently stumbled across the transcript of a talk by Richard Hamming, of coding theory fame, entitled "You and Your Research". I enjoyed a lot reading that piece, and, even though the incipit of that talk makes it abundantly clear that Hamming is not talking about the kind of research my own belongs to, I think that there is a lot one can learn from Hamming's observations. For instance, he discusses, amongst many others, issues like the role of factors like

• "luck" and "lots of brains",
• courage (he writes "Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can."),
• age,
• working conditions and
• drive

in doing first-class research. All his claims are substantiated by witty and personal observations.

If there is a part of that talk that, in my opinion, summarizes an ideal of research that it is definitely worth striving for, even for ordinary humans like me, it is when Hamming, amongst many others nuggets, says:

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. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

Now if you are much of a mathematician you know that the effort to generalize often means that the solution is simple. Often by stopping and saying, ``This is the problem he wants but this is characteristic of so and so. Yes, I can attack the whole class with a far superior method than the particular one because I was earlier embedded in needless detail.'' The business of abstraction frequently makes things simple. Furthermore, I filed away the methods and prepared for the future problems.

To end this part, I'll remind you, ``It is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the best answer he can.'' And I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!

In that talk, Hamming also offers some eminently citable quotes that we can use to pepper our own seminars. For instance, he cites Pasteur---who said, "Luck favors the prepared mind."---, and Newton---who said, "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results." There is also room for the well known opinion of Edison's that "Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.''

I hope that some of the members of my research community will enjoy reading this talk as much as I did. I wish I had had the chance of attending that talk, or that I had delivered it myself!