Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Richard Hamming

88 quotes

“Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Apparently an "art"—which almost by definition cannot be put into words—is probably best communicated by approaching it from many sides and doing so repeatedly, hoping thereby students will finally master enough of the art, or if you wish, style, to significantly increase their future contributions to society.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past is... much more uncertain—or even falsely reported—than is usually recognized.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am concerned with educating and not training you. ...Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. Either one without the other is not of much use. You might think education should precede training, but the kind of educating I am trying to do must be based on your past experiences and technical knowledge.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Either you will be a leader, or a follower, and my goal is for you to be a leader.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of engineering involves some creativity to cover the parts not known, and almost all of science includes some practical engineering to translate the abstractions into practice.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of present science rests on engineering tools, and as time goes on, engineering seems to involve more and more of the science part. ...the two fields are growing together! ...and now there is not enough time to allow us the leisure which comes from separating the two fields.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is obvious: The past was once the future and the future will become the past.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Often it is not physical limitations... but rather it is human made laws, habits, and organizational rules, regulations, personal egos, and inertia, which dominate the evolution of the future.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is probable that the future will be more limited by the slow evolution of the human animal and the corresponding human laws, social institutions, and organizations than it will be by the rapid evolution of technology.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance √n. ...the accuracy of the vision matters less than you suppose, getting anywhere is better than drifting, there are potentially many paths to greatness for you... No vision, not much of a future.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen? In a sense the first is Science... The second is Engineering.. The third is ethics, morals, or... value judgements. ...you will probably have an idea of how to alter things to make the more desirable future occur ...having a vision is what tends to separate the leaders from the followers.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The standard process of organizing knowledge into departments, and subderpartments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably... the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal... A life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living. ...a life without such a goal... is merely existing...”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Transmission through space (typically signaling) is the same as transmission through time (storage).”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more complex the designed system the more field maintenance must be central to the final design. Only when field maintenance is part of the original design can it be safely controlled... This applies to both mechanical things and to human organizations.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1950s in an address to the President and V.Ps of Bell Laboratories I said, "At present we are doing 1 out of 10 experiments on the computers and 9 in the labs, but before I leave it will be 9 out of 10 on the machines". They did not believe me... by now we do somewhere between 90% to 99% on the machines... And this trend will go on!”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must not forget, in all the enthusiasm for computer simulations, occasionally we must look at Nature as She is.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The people at the bottom do not have the larger, global view, but at the top they do not have the local view of all the details, many of which can often be very important, so either extreme gets poor results.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An idea which arises in the field, based on the direct experience of the people doing the job, cannot get going in a centrally controlled system... The not invented here (NIH) syndrome is one of the major curses of our society...”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fundamentals of language are not understood to this day. ...Until we understand languages of communication involving humans as they are then it is unlikely many of our software problems will vanish.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you take a course in Euclidean geometry is not the teacher putting a... learning program into you? ...You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. ...Are you sure you are not merely "programmed" in life by what by chance events happens to you?”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are beginning to find not only is intelligence not adequately defined so arguments can be settled scientifically, but a lot of other associated words like, computer, learning, information, ideas, decisions, expert behavior—all are a bit fuzzy...”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the type of AI I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. ...There are doubts as to what fraction of the population can compete with computers, even with nice interactive prompting menus.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The feeling of having free will is deep in us and we are reluctant to give it up for ourselves—but we are often willing to deny it to others!”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We constantly use the word "simplify", but its meaning depends on what you are going to do next, and there is no uniform definition.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps thinking should be measured not by what you do but by how you do it.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know that the great Hilbert said, "We will not be driven out of the paradise Cantor has created for us," and I reply, "I see no reason for walking in!" Indeed, in time, as more and more people get used to computers, I am inclined to believe that we here on this Earth will decide that the computable numbers are enough.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only generally agreed upon definition of mathematics is "Mathematics is what mathematicians do." [...] In the face of this difficulty [of defining "computer science"] many people, including myself at times, feel that we should ignore the discussion and get on with doing it. But as George Forsythe points out so well in a recent article*, it does matter what people in Washington D.C. think computer science is. According to him, they tend to feel that it is a part of applied mathematics and therefore turn to the mathematicians for advice in the granting of funds. And it is not greatly different elsewhere; in both industry and the universities you can often still see traces of where computing first started, whether in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or even business. Evidently the picture which people have of a subject can significantly affect its subsequent development. Therefore, although we cannot hope to settle the question definitively, we need frequently to examine and to air our views on what our subject is and should become.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: *Hamming cites Forsythe, G.E., "What to do until the computer scientist comes", Am. Math. Monthly 75 (5), May 1968, p. 454-461.
“When you yourself are responsible for some new application in mathematics... then your reputation... and possibly even human lives, may depend on the results you predict. It is then the need for mathematical rigor will become painfully obvious to you. ...Mathematical rigor is the clarification of the reasoning used in mathematics. ...a closer examination of the numerous "hidden assumptions" is made. ...Over the years there has been a gradually rising standard of rigor; proofs that satisfied the best mathematicians of one generation have been found inadequate by the next generation. Rigor is not a yes-no property of a proof... it is a vague standard of careful treatment that is currently acceptable to a particular group.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Besides the theory there are a lot of small technical details that must be learned so well that you can recall them almost instantaneously, such as the trigonometric identities... put one part of the identity on one side of a 3 x 5 card and the other part on the other side. Using these flash cards you can, in the odd moments of your daily life, learn the mechanical parts of the course. ...for this kind of low-level material many short learning sessions are much more efficient than a few long, intense ones; but this is not necessarily true for larger ideas. ...most students will not use such trivial devices as flash cards; it seems to be beneath their dignity. They suffer accordingly.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. [...] The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems. [...] In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Probability is too important to be left to the experts. [...] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. [...] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source