Via MR , I read the following invocation of Richard Hamming:
In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:Just be sure to read all of Hamming's talk. Hamming also said,1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?
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.
1 Comments:
Hi Dave,
I enjoyed going through Hammings talk. I hope you had a good holiday and a fun time visiting home. I'll try to make it down to harvey one of these days to catch up with everyone.
-Punit
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