Richard Hamming quotes - page 4

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)
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. View quote
Richard Hamming
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. View quote
Richard Hamming
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. View quote
Richard Hamming
Without continuous mathematics, the study of discrete mathematics soon becomes trivial and very limited. ...The two topics. View quote
Richard Hamming
There is no unique, correct answer in most cases. It is a matter of taste. View quote
Richard Hamming
Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. View quote
Richard Hamming
It is the same as an art course. View quote
Richard Hamming
There is simply too much known to continue the older approach of giving detailed results. View quote
Richard Hamming
No vision, not much of a future. View quote
Richard Hamming
It is easy to measure your mastery of the results via a conventional examination; it is less easy to measure your mastery of doing mathematics. (Richard Hamming)
Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things. View quote
Richard Hamming
Until we understand languages of communication involving humans as they are then it is unlikely many of our software problems will vanish. View quote
Richard Hamming
The newer aspects of many fields start with the admission of uncertainty. View quote
Richard Hamming
Euclid's postulates came from the Pythagorean theorem, not the other way around. View quote
Richard Hamming
In the face of almost infinite useful knowledge, we have adopted the strategy of "information regeneration rather than information retrieval." ...most importantly, you should be able to generate the result you need even if no one has ever done it before you. View quote
Richard Hamming
The assumptions and definitions of mathematics and science come from our intuition. View quote
Richard Hamming
When a theory is sufficiently general to cover many fields of application, it acquires some "truth" from each of them. View quote
Richard Hamming
Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. View quote
Richard Hamming
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. View quote
Richard Hamming
There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think. (Richard Hamming)
If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you dont quite know what problems are worth working on. View quote
Richard Hamming
As a practicing computer veteran, this reviewer has the habit of looking at the hypothesis of a theorem and asking:. View quote
Richard Hamming
When a theory is sufficiently general to cover many fields of application, it acquires some "truth" from each of them. Thus... a positive value for generalization in mathematics. View quote
Richard Hamming
There is no unique, correct answer in most cases. It is a matter of taste, depending on the circumstances... and the particular age you live in. ...Gradually, you will develop your own taste, and along the way you may occasionally recognize that your taste may be the best one! It is the same as an art course. View quote
Richard Hamming