63 Quotes by Richard Hamming

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.

Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.

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