63 Quotes by Richard Hamming

Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the study of failures. There are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did 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.

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

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

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

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

I need to discuss science vs. engineering. 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.

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

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.