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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Hamming (of Hamming codes) has a famous Bell Labs talk "You and Your Research", describing how to have a large impact. It covers a lot of the same ground, but in more detail:

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

A few points from it:

You've got to work on important problems.

How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. But great work is something else than mere brains.

The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it.

The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.

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Of course. PG's kind of obsessed by this and even republished the talk on his own website, for some reason:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Lots of past threads, most recently

You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28322153 - Aug 2021 (35 comments)

with links to the rest here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28323486

His book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering goes into some of this (and is just generally great): https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

Hamming is great in general. Some years ago, I picked up a copy of "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" for like $2 at a used book store. I had no idea who Hamming was, but it was cheap so I bought it.

After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You and Your Research".

All of Hamming's books are Great. Most are available from Dover Publications for cheap. In particular; checkout his

* Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics.

* The Art of Probability.

One of the relatively younger Bell Labs guys who experienced Hamming (in my memory it was either Ken Thompson or Kernighan) described in a public talk the way Hamming would approach young scientists and engineers in the cafeteria and harangue them if he deemed their current area of research non-world shaking, and therefore unworthy of their attention. It was a hilarious story because Hamming was described after a brief pause as a "curmudgeon" but one got the distinct impression Hamming's younger associates had other, more colorful words to describe him.

i think feynman's stance on "important problems" was a lot better: http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/pr...

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