“You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming

Posted on May 5, 2008
Filed Under Misc, Quote |

Or: Yes, I’m studying for finals and don’t have time for a more rigorous post.

If you haven’t read a transcript of the talk "You and Your Research " by Richard Hamming, I highly recommend that you take the 45 minutes and read it.

Since you are unlikely to, I have found the issues most relevant to computer scientists and mathematicians, and discuss them below. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the advice that Hamming gives in this talk, but is some of my favorite advice. If you don’t read the talk, you’ll miss important advice, such as how to teach your boss.

The talk focuses on necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for performing great research. You may not be a researcher, but Hamming mentions some great general lessons that apply to all areas of life. When I mention research below, the careful reader should mentally substitute his or her own interest.

For those of you who do not know of Richard Hamming, all you need to do is peruse his list of accomplishments to get a sense of his qualifications to give a talk on world-class research. Enough is named after him that he starts to run into the Euler effect: if you take the right class, the answer to the question "Who do you think discovered this?" is invariably "Hamming!"

I’m not kidding, though: you should definitely read the talk .

More Than Luck: Courage

The first thing that the great researcher must have on their side, according to Hamming, is courage. The person who sets out to do great work should say to themselves, "I would like to do first-class work." Great work is not done by luck, after all.

Was Euler lucky to work on so many great math theorems? Was Hamming? How about Einstein? The fact of the matter is that it is partly luck, but that these individuals were trying to do good work. Luck isn’t the entire part of the equation. As Pasteur said, "Luck favors the prepared mind." Richard Hamming is even more assertive that luck has little to do with anything:

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.
…
I want to dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you do great work or not. I claim you have some, but not total, control over it. And I will quote, finally, Newton on the matter. Newton said, "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results."

In reality, great work is done by those who dare to do great work. He uses Claude Shannon as an example. Hamming posits that Shannon’s "major theorem" was a theorem of great courage.

If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn’t know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, “What would the average random code do?” He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts?

Plant Acorns

The most important part of Hamming’s speech is the idea of planting acorns. Even if Hamming himself does not think this is the case, he mentions the idea enough times that it would certainly get an honorable mention from him. Hamming also mentions that failing to do this will cause great scientists to only become good scientists, but more on that below.

In order to perform really world-class research, you need to work on lots of little problems, and file away the answers. If you develop general solutions to a lot of small problems, and write them so that others can build upon the work, then you will somehow be involved in their eventual solution. Either you will finally have all of the pieces that you need to attack a great problem, or you will contribute to someone else who puts all of the pieces together. After all, as Hamming notes, we should be standing on the shoulders of others, not their toes!

The Weight of Success

Let’s say that your intelligence and determination pay off — with a little bit of luck. You are now world-famous in your field, and everybody expects you to do great things henceforth. This is a critical tipping point, one where the rest of humanity is going to try to weigh you down.

At one point in the speech, Hamming declares, "The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards." This is a hell of a condemnation of the scientific community: that they would needlessly bog down a great name rather than let the name do some more great work.

The biggest problem is that after your first success, people expect only success from you. You are supposed to only work on great problems, failing to "plant the acorns" that eventually lead to great work. Claude Shannon fell victim to this. After all, once you have developed an entirely new field as your first act, what can be the encore?

The Value of Kindness and Presentation

I feel that this is one of the important points that will be most overlooked, so make sure you read and understand these parts of Hamming’s speech. Hamming goes out of his way to point out to the audience that one of the best things you can do for your own career is to always be nice to the supporting cast of characters that surrounds you. Hamming gives several different examples of this, and speaks at length of the consequences of failing to bend in the right places.

Another personality defect is ego assertion and I’ll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, “Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time’. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they’ll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven’t mistreated them.” Answer, I wasn’t dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn’t dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.

…

By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help. For instance, one time for some idiot reason all the reproducing services at Murray Hill were tied up. Don’t ask me how, but they were. I wanted something done. My secretary called up somebody at Holmdel, hopped the company car, made the hour-long trip down and got it reproduced, and then came back. It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort to cheer her up, tell her jokes and be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me. By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.

He also talks at length about other scientists who have decided to "assert their egos" rather than appear nice and play the game. If they decide that they aren’t going to make the "appearance of conforming", these people are not going to get extra help. They will need to fight at every moment in order to get the extra help, so they will be putting extra energy into the wrong pursuits in life.

At the end of the day, this can be reduced to swimming. How far are you going to swim with the current, and how far can you make it against the current?

Drive

We all know about quotes on drive by Edison , but Hamming says it best:

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!

Think Great Thoughts

Hamming clearly enjoys this particular aspect of his approach to life. He talks about how, every Friday, he would only think great thoughts. Not particular thoughts about work, but questions like "What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?"

Putting yourself in the mindset of only thinking great thoughts for a particular period of time leads you to view oncoming trends and learn how to best take advantage of them. If you can see which way the wave is breaking, you will know which direction you will need to work towards.

Selling Your Work

Hamming himself admits that this is a particularly distasteful aspect of the job of a scientist, but it is necessary to sell your research. Everybody out there is trying like hell to find their own research, so you need to show them why your work is so great.

The first skill that you must learn is to sharpen your communication skills. You can’t show people why your work is so great if you can’t communicate this. In my opinion, this can sometimes be even better than being truly great: after all, Stephen Wolfram has walked into the scientific spotlight with perhaps as much bombast as science.

You must learn to excel at all forms of talking: not only should you be able to chime in during informal conversations and assert your viewpoint, but you also must be able to get up in front of large crowds of people and give excellent talks.

Hamming speaks at length about what is necessary to give a good talk. The first thing that the scientist must do is to overcome the urge to give an extremely detailed technical talk. Obviously, this is not always possible, but there are excellent odds that your audience will not be interested in a wholly technical talk. They would like to see an explanation as to why a solution is important rather than the details of the solution.

In general, it is important to examine closely the habits of those whose words carry great weight. What do they do differently? They are clearly causing an emotional effect inside of people, and it is important to try to learn from their presentation skills and mimic what they do properly.

Know Thyself

Hamming says that it is important to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. It is important to play to your strengths, it is important to help your weaknesses, but it is also truly helpful to be able to turn you weaknesses into assets. Hamming says that he was able to use his ego to his advantage:

I knew that most people who took a sabbatical to write a book, didn’t finish it on time. So before I left, I told all my friends that when I come back, that book was going to be done! Yes, I would have it done - I’d have been ashamed to come back without it! I used my ego to make myself behave the way I wanted to.

In Summary

Hamming’s conclusion of the speech says it best:

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. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!"

Popularity: 9% [?]

Comments

Leave a Reply