Richard Hamming``You và Your Research""Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986 J. F. Kaiser Bell Communications Research 445 South Street Morristown, NJ 07962-1910 jfk
bellcore.com At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California & a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, `You & Your Research" lớn an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members & visitors at the Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986. This talk centered on Hamming"s observations & research on the question ``Why vị so few scientists make significant contributions và so many are forgotten in the long run?"" From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, và why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists và great contributions, & has done introspection & studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, & philosophy. In order to lớn make the information in the talk more widely available, the tape recording that was made of that talk was carefully transcribed. This transcription includes the discussions which followed in the question và answer period. As with any talk, the transcribed version suffers from translation as all the inflections of voice và the gestures of the speaker are lost; one must listen lớn the tape recording khổng lồ recapture that part of the presentation. While the recording of Richard Hamming"s talk was completely intelligible, that of some of the questioner"s remarks were not. Where the tape recording was not intelligible I have added in parentheses my impression of the questioner"s remarks. Where there was a question and I could identify the questioner, I have checked with each to lớn ensure the accuracy of my interpretation of their remarks. INTRODUCTION OF DR. RICHARD W. HAMMING As a speaker in the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, was introduced by Alan G. Chynoweth, Vice President, Applied Research, Bell Communications Research. Alan G. Chynoweth: Greetings colleagues, & also khổng lồ many of our former colleagues from Bell Labs who, I understand, are here to be with us today on what I regard as a particularly felicitous occasion. It gives me very great pleasure indeed khổng lồ introduce to you my old friend và colleague from many many years back, Richard Hamming, or Dick Hamming as he has always been know khổng lồ all of us. Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I"m sure the audience here does not need reminding. He received his early education at the Universities of Chicago và Nebraska, & got his Ph.D. At Illinois; he then joined the Los Alamos project during the war. Afterwards, in 1946, he joined Bell Labs. & that is, of course, where I met Dick - when I joined Bell Labs in their physics research organization. In those days, we were in the habit of lunching together as a physics group, & for some reason this strange fellow from mathematics was always pleased to lớn join us. We were always happy lớn have him with us because he brought so many unorthodox ideas và views. Those lunches were stimulating, I can assure you. While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I"ve always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs & have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing. I think the record speaks for itself. It is too long khổng lồ go through all the details, but let me point out, for example, that he has written seven books & of those seven books which tell of various areas of mathematics & computers & coding and information theory, three are already well into their second edition. That is testimony indeed to the prolific output và the stature of Dick Hamming. I think I last met him - it must have been about ten years ago - at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. As always, he was tremendously entertaining. Just one more example of the provocative thoughts that he comes up with: I remember him saying, ``There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think."" Well, with Dick Hamming around, we don"t need a computer. I think that we are in for an extremely entertaining talk. THE TALK: ``You & Your Research"" by Dr. Richard W. Hamming It"s a pleasure to be here. I doubt if I can live up to the Introduction. The title of my talk is, ``You and Your Research."" It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually vày your research. I could give a talk on the other subject - but it"s not, it"s about you. I"m not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I"m talking about great research. & for the sake of describing great research I"ll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn"t have to lớn gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon"s information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that"s the kind of thing I"m talking about. Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in lớn run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists và physicists could get back lớn business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted lớn know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi và Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do & those who might have done. When I came khổng lồ Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, & there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?"" và ``What is the difference?"" I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to bởi vì this?"" I tried to lớn find out what are the differences. Và that"s what this talk is about. Now, why is this talk important? I think it is important because, as far as I know, each of you has one life to live. Even if you believe in reincarnation it doesn"t vì you any good from one life to lớn the next! Why shouldn"t you vị significant things in this one life, however you define significant? I"m not going to lớn define it - you know what I mean. I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, & I"ve been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to lớn science. In order lớn get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have khổng lồ get you khổng lồ drop modesty & say to yourself, ``Yes, I would lượt thích to bởi first-class work."" Our society frowns on people who phối out to vì really good work. You"re not supposed to; luck is supposed lớn descend on you và you bởi great things by chance. Well, that"s a kind of dumb thing to lớn say. I say, why shouldn"t you set out to vị something significant. You don"t have to lớn tell other people, but shouldn"t you say khổng lồ yourself, ``Yes, I would like to bởi something significant."" In order to lớn get khổng lồ the second stage, I have khổng lồ drop modesty and talk in the first person about what I"ve seen, what I"ve done, và what I"ve heard. I"m going to lớn talk about people, some of whom you know, & I trust that when we leave, you won"t quote me as saying some of the things I said. Let me start not logically, but psychologically. I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It"s all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn"t it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn"t vì just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things & some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, và we"ll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. Và I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind."" và I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn"t. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important & does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you vì is luck, but that you bởi vì something is not. For example, when I came to Bell Labs, I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us did it at the same place and at the same time - it was in the atmosphere. And you can say, ``Yes, it was luck."" On the other hand you can say, ``But why of all the people in Bell Labs then were those the two who did it?"" Yes, it is partly luck, and partly it is the prepared mind; but `partly" is the other thing I"m going to lớn talk about. So, although I"ll come back several more times khổng lồ luck, I want lớn dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you vì chưng great work or not. I claim you have some, but not total, control over it. Và 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."" 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 và had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, ``What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?"" Now he knew that electromagnetic theory says you cannot have a stationary local maximum. But if he moved along with the velocity of light, he would see a local maximum. He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around there, that everything was not right and that the velocity of light had something peculiar. Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments. Now that"s the necessary but not sufficient condition. All of these items I will talk about are both luck and not luck. How about having lots of `brains?" It sounds good. Most of you in this room probably have more than enough brains to do first-class work. But great work is something else than mere brains. Brains are measured in various ways. In mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, typically brains correlates khổng lồ a great extent with the ability to lớn manipulate symbols. & so the typical IQ thử nghiệm is apt to lớn score them fairly high. On the other hand, in other fields it is something different. For example, Bill Pfann, the fellow who did zone melting, came into my office one day. He had this idea dimly in his mind about what he wanted & he had some equations. It was pretty clear khổng lồ me that this man didn"t know much mathematics & he wasn"t really articulate. His problem seemed interesting so I took it trang chủ and did a little work. I finally showed him how lớn run computers so he could compute his own answers. I gave him the power to lớn compute. He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department, but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field. Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away & he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate. & I can cite another person in the same way. I trust he isn"t in the audience, i.e. A fellow named Clogston. I met him when I was working on a problem with John Pierce"s group và I didn"t think he had much. I asked my friends who had been with him at school, ``Was he lượt thích that in graduate school?"" ``Yes,"" they replied. Well I would have fired the fellow, but J. R. Pierce was smart and kept him on. Clogston finally did the Clogston cable. After that there was a steady stream of good ideas. One success brought him confidence & courage. One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up & believe that you can vị important problems, then you can. 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 lớn create a method of coding, but he doesn"t know what to vì so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. Và 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 lớn think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue khổng lồ think. Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to vì it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists vì what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don"t bởi good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics và literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don"t know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect. But let me say why age seems to lớn have the effect it does. In the first place if you vì chưng some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees & unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up & made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, ``I know about this Nobel-Prize effect & I am not going to lớn let it affect me; I am going to lớn remain good old Walter Brattain."" Well I said khổng lồ myself, ``That is nice."" But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems. When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what bởi you vì for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to lớn continue lớn plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try lớn get the big thing right off. Và that isn"t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. 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 & judged by what they did after. Not that they weren"t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there & were only good afterwards. This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever. I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident khổng lồ me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren"t going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go khổng lồ the West Coast & get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I want khổng lồ go or not?"" and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said khổng lồ myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can vì practically everything. Why can"t you make them write programs?"" What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to lớn be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to lớn be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing và say, ``Gee, I"m never going khổng lồ get enough programmers, so how can I ever vì any great programming?"" & there are many other stories of the same kind; Grace Hopper has similar ones. I think that if you look carefully you will see that often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect lớn an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn"t vì chưng a problem finally began to lớn study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, ``But of course, this is what it is"" and got an important result. So ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren"t always the best ones for you. 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 và 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, & 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! What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge và productivity are like compound interest."" Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don"t want lớn give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in & day out lớn get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode"s remark to lớn heart; I spent a good khuyễn mãi giảm giá more of my time for some years trying to lớn work a bit harder và I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don"t lượt thích to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to lớn neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There"s no question about this. On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration."" He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That"s the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn"t get you anywhere. I"ve often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn"t have so much to lớn show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly. There"s another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while khổng lồ discover its importance. Most people lượt thích 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 khổng lồ notice the errors & faults so they can step forward và 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. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true & they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don"t quite fit và they don"t forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to lớn write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you"ve got lớn be sensitive and keep track of those things, và keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed khổng lồ fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down khổng lồ an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed khổng lồ their problem. Those who don"t become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work. Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. & I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally lớn saying, ``creativity comes out of your subconscious."" Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you"re aware your dreams are, to lớn a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed & committed lớn a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to bởi vì but work on your problem. Và so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there"s the answer. For those who don"t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn"t produce the big result. So the way lớn manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don"t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to lớn work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free. Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians và I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn"t learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to lớn Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken Mc
Kay & other people, & I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, & a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them! Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave Mc
Call; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over và said, ``Do you mind if I join you?"" They can"t say no, so I started eating with them for a while. & I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?"" & after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?"" và after some more time I came in one day & said, ``If what you are doing is not important, và if you don"t think it is going khổng lồ lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"" I wasn"t welcomed after that; I had to lớn find somebody else to lớn eat with! That was in the spring. In the fall, Dave Mc
Call stopped me in the hall & said, ``Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. What were the important problems in my field. I haven"t changed my research,"" he says, ``but I think it was well worthwhile."" và I said, ``Thank you Dave,"" và went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a thành viên of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable lớn ask themselves, ``What are the important problems in my field?"" If you bởi not work on an important problem, it"s unlikely you"ll do important work. It"s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, & they keep an eye on wondering how khổng lồ attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem" must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to lớn mention. We didn"t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, và (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we bởi vì not have an attack. It"s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don"t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. 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 & he also doesn"t believe that they will lead to important problems. I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can"t always know exactly where khổng lồ be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. Và even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don"t have to hide in the valley where you"re safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time và so he (or she) doesn"t produce much. It"s that simple. If you want to vì chưng great work, you clearly must work on important problems, & you should have an idea. Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey và others, I finally adopted what I called ``Great Thoughts Time."" When I went lớn lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: ``What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?"", ``How will computers change science?"" For example, I came up with the observation at that time that nine out of ten experiments were done in the lab & one in ten on the computer. I made a remark lớn the vice presidents one time, that it would be reversed, i.e. Nine out of ten experiments would be done on the computer and one in ten in the lab. They knew I was a crazy mathematician and had no sense of reality. I knew they were wrong and they"ve been proved wrong while I have been proved right. They built laboratories when they didn"t need them. I saw that computers were transforming science because I spent a lot of time asking ``What will be the impact of computers on science and how can I change it?"" I asked myself, ``How is it going to lớn change Bell Labs?"" I remarked one time, in the same address, that more than one-half of the people at Bell Labs will be interacting closely with computing machines before I leave. Well, you all have terminals now. I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, & what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can vì important things. Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 và 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. & when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem."" They drop all the other things và get after it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to lớn me but I can"t vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an airport talking to lớn a friend of mine from Los Alamos about how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over in Europe when it did because that got us working on the atomic bomb here in the US. He said ``No; at Berkeley we had gathered a bunch of data; we didn"t get around lớn reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission."" They had it in their hands & they didn"t pursue it. They came in second! The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it và they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity & they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn"t work out, but you don"t have to lớn hit many of them to vì some great science. It"s kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is lớn live a long time! Another trait, it took me a while to lớn notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door xuất hiện or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door lớn your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don"t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you bởi vì is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as lớn what the world is và what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind."" I don"t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately vị important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame. I want to lớn talk on another topic. It is based on the tuy nhiên which I think many of you know, ``It ain"t what you do, it"s the way that you vì it."" I"ll start with an example of my own. I was conned into doing on a digital computer, in the absolute binary days, a problem which the best analog computers couldn"t do. Và I was getting an answer. When I thought carefully & said to lớn myself, ``You know, Hamming, you"re going to have to file a report on this military job; after you spend a lot of money you"re going to have to tài khoản for it và every analog installation is going lớn want the report to see if they can"t find flaws in it."" I was doing the required integration by a rather crummy method, to lớn say the least, but I was getting the answer. And I realized that in truth the problem was not just lớn get the answer; it was to demonstrate for the first time, and beyond question, that I could beat the analog computer on its own ground with a digital machine. I reworked the method of solution, created a theory which was nice & elegant, and changed the way we computed the answer; the results were no different. The published report had an elegant method which was later known for years as ``Hamming"s Method of Integrating Differential Equations."" It is somewhat obsolete now, but for a while it was a very good method. By changing the problem slightly, I did important work rather than trivial work. In the same way, when using the machine up in the attic in the early days, I was solving one problem after another after another; a fair number were successful và there were a few failures. I went trang chủ one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn"t happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another. After quite a while of thinking I decided, ``No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year"s problems, not just the one in front of my face."" By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things và did important work. I attacked the major problem - How bởi vì I conquer machines & do all of next year"s problems when I don"t know what they are going to lớn be? How vì chưng I prepare for it? How vày I bởi vì this one so I"ll be on vị trí cao nhất of it? How vì I obey Newton"s rule? He said, ``If I have seen further than others, it is because I"ve stood on the shoulders of giants."" These days we stand on each other"s feet! You should bởi vì your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I"ve stood on so and so"s shoulders & I saw further."" The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often bởi great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class. Now if you are much of a mathematician you know that the effort to generalize often means that the solution is simple. Often by stopping & saying, ``This is the problem he wants but this is characteristic of so & so. Yes, I can attack the whole class with a far superior method than the particular one because I was earlier embedded in needless detail."" The business of abstraction frequently makes things simple. Furthermore, I filed away the methods & prepared for the future problems. To end this part, I"ll remind you, ``It is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he"s got, and gets the best answer he can."" và I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great giảm giá khuyến mãi of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you"ve done, or you can vì chưng it in such a fashion that the next person has lớn essentially duplicate again what you"ve done. It isn"t just a matter of the job, it"s the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It"s just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. Và it"s much more satisfying & rewarding! I have now come down to lớn a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to bởi a job, you have to sell it. `Selling" khổng lồ a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It"s very ugly; you shouldn"t have to vày it. The world is supposed khổng lồ be waiting, and when you vị something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will mix aside what they are doing, look at what you"ve done, read it, and come back & say, ``Yes, that was good."" I suggest that when you xuất hiện a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles và not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won"t just turn your pages but they will stop & read yours. If they don"t stop và read it, you won"t get credit. There are three things you have to vị in selling. You have lớn learn to write clearly & well so that people will read it, you must learn khổng lồ give reasonably formal talks, & you also must learn to lớn give informal talks. We had a lot of so-called `back room scientists." In a conference, they would keep quiet. Three weeks later after a decision was made they filed a report saying why you should bởi vì so & so. Well, it was too late. They would not stand up right in the middle of a hot conference, in the middle of activity, and say, ``We should bởi this for these reasons."" You need lớn master that form of communication as well as prepared speeches. When I first started, I got practically physically ill while giving a speech, và I was very, very nervous. I realized I either had lớn learn to lớn give speeches smoothly or I would essentially partially cripple my whole career. The first time IBM asked me khổng lồ give a speech in new york one evening, I decided I was going to give a really good speech, a speech that was wanted, not a technical one but a broad one, and at the over if they liked it, I"d quietly say, ``Any time you want one I"ll come in and give you one."" As a result, I got a great giảm giá of practice giving speeches khổng lồ a limited audience và I got over being afraid. Furthermore, I could also then study what methods were effective and what were ineffective. While going to meetings I had already been studying why some papers are remembered & most are not. The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk & wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to lớn give. As a result, many talks are ineffective. The speaker names a topic và suddenly plunges into the details he"s solved. Few people in the audience may follow. You should paint a general picture khổng lồ say why it"s important, và then slowly give a sketch of what was done. Then a larger number of people will say, ``Yes, Joe has done that,"" or ``Mary has done that; I really see where it is; yes, Mary really gave a good talk; I understand what Mary has done."" The tendency is lớn give a highly restricted, safe talk; this is usually ineffective. Furthermore, many talks are filled with far too much information. So I say this idea of selling is obvious. Let me summarize. You"ve got khổng lồ work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe khổng lồ Pasteur"s ``Luck favors the prepared mind."" I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to lớn understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. What was và what was not important. I found in the early days I had believed `this" and yet had spent all week marching in `that" direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why bởi I march in this direction? I either had to lớn change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did & I marched in the direction I thought was important. It"s that easy. Now you might tell me you haven"t got control over what you have to work on. Well, when you first begin, you may not. But once you"re moderately successful, there are more people asking for results than you can deliver and you have some power of choice, but not completely. I"ll tell you a story about that, và it bears on the subject of educating your boss. I had a trùm cuối named Schelkunoff; he was, và still is, a very good friend of mine. Some military person came to me and demanded some answers by Friday. Well, I had already dedicated my computing resources to lớn reducing data on the fly for a group of scientists; I was knee deep in short, small, important problems. This military person wanted me khổng lồ solve his problem by the kết thúc of the day on Friday. I said, ``No, I"ll give it to lớn you Monday. I can work on it over the weekend. I"m not going to bởi vì it now."" He goes down lớn my boss, Schelkunoff, và Schelkunoff says, ``You must run this for him; he"s got khổng lồ have it by Friday."" I tell him, ``Why vày I?""; he says, ``You have to."" I said, ``Fine, Sergei, but you"re sitting in your office Friday afternoon catching the late bus home to watch as this fellow walks out that door."" I gave the military person the answers late Friday afternoon. I then went to Schelkunoff"s office & sat down; as the man goes out I say, ``You see Schelkunoff, this fellow has nothing under his arm; but I gave him the answers."" On Monday morning Schelkunoff called him up và said, ``Did you come in khổng lồ work over the weekend?"" I could hear, as it were, a pause as the fellow ran through his mind of what was going khổng lồ happen; but he knew he would have had to sign in, & he"d better not say he had when he hadn"t, so he said he hadn"t. Ever after that Schelkunoff said, ``You set your deadlines; you can change them."" One lesson was sufficient to lớn educate my quái nhân as to lớn why I didn"t want to vì chưng big jobs that displaced exploratory research & why I was justified in not doing crash jobs which absorb all the research computing facilities. I wanted instead lớn use the facilities lớn compute a large number of small problems. Again, in the early days, I was limited in computing capacity and it was clear, in my area, that a ``mathematician had no use for machines."" But I needed more machine capacity. Every time I had lớn tell some scientist in some other area, ``No I can"t; I haven"t the machine capacity,"" he complained. I said ``Go tell your Vice President that Hamming needs more computing capacity."" After a while I could see what was happening up there at the top; many people said khổng lồ my Vice President, ``Your man needs more computing capacity."" I got it! I also did a second thing. When I loaned what little programming power nguồn we had to help in the early days of computing, I said, ``We are not getting the recognition for our programmers that they deserve. When you publish a paper you will thank that programmer or you aren"t getting any more help from me. That programmer is going lớn be thanked by name; she"s worked hard."" I waited a couple of years. I then went through a year of BSTJ articles and counted what fraction thanked some programmer. I took it into the boss và said, ``That"s the central role computing is playing in Bell Labs; if the BSTJ is important, that"s how important computing is."" He had to give in. You can educate your bosses. It"s a hard job. In this talk I"m only viewing from the bottom up; I"m not viewing from the đứng top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of đứng đầu management. You have to sell your ideas there also. Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to lớn be a great scientist worth it?"" to answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, & knowing it, is as good as wine, women and tuy nhiên put together,"" or if it"s a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and tuy vậy put together."" và if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying khổng lồ participate in those moments of discovery. They"re always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared khổng lồ go out and ask those who didn"t do great work how they felt about the matter. It"s a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle khổng lồ try & do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle khổng lồ make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion. I"ve told you how to vị it. It is so easy, so why vày so many people, with all their talents, fail? For example, my opinion, khổng lồ this day, is that there are in the mathematics department at Bell Labs quite a few people far more able & far better endowed than I, but they didn"t produce as much. Some of them did produce more than I did; Shannon produced more than I did, và some others produced a lot, but I was highly productive against a lot of other fellows who were better equipped. Why is it so? What happened to lớn them? Why bởi vì so many of the people who have great promise, fail? Well, one of the reasons is drive & commitment. The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill & dabble in it, who work during the day & go home and bởi other things & come back & work the next day. They don"t have the deep commitment that is apparently necessary for really first-class work. They turn out lots of good work, but we were talking, remember, about first-class work. There is a difference. Good people, very talented people, almost always turn out good work. We"re talking about the outstanding work, the type of work that gets the Nobel Prize and gets recognition. The second thing is, I think, the problem of personality defects. Now I"ll cite a fellow whom I met out in Irvine. He had been the head of a computing center and he was temporarily on assignment as a special assistant khổng lồ the president of the university. It was obvious he had a job with a great future. He took me into his office one time and showed me his method of getting letters done and how he took care of his correspondence. He pointed out how inefficient the secretary was. He kept all his letters stacked around there; he knew where everything was. & he would, on his word processor, get the letter out. He was bragging how marvelous it was và how he could get so much more work done without the secretary"s interference. Well, behind his back, I talked to the secretary. The secretary said, ``Of course I can"t help him; I don"t get his mail. He won"t give me the stuff to lớn log in; I don"t know where he puts it on the floor. Of course I can"t help him."" So I went khổng lồ him và said, ``Look, if you adopt the present method & do what you can do single-handedly, you can go just that far & no farther than you can bởi vì single-handedly. If you will learn to lớn work with the system, you can go as far as the system will tư vấn you."" And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control & was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system. You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system & take advantage of all the system has khổng lồ offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to lớn use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to lớn use the system pretty well, và you can learn how khổng lồ get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No", you just go lớn your boss & get a `No" easy. If you want to do something, don"t ask, bởi it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don"t give him a chance to tell you `No". But if you want a `No", it"s easy lớn get a `No". Another personality defect is ego assertion và I"ll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos & in the early days I was using a machine in thành phố new york at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo & all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I mix out khổng lồ measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to lớn 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 lớn find someone to slip in, but they go out và 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 khổng lồ just that - I wasn"t dressing properly. I had to lớn make the decision - was I going lớn assert my ego và dress the way I wanted to & have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going lớn appear khổng lồ conform better? I decided I would make an effort khổng lồ appear khổng lồ conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. Và now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people. You should dress according to lớn the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going khổng lồ give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo & an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not khổng lồ let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to lớn be able to bởi vì this, that, or the other thing, & they pay a steady price. John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office và it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man và he had better listen. For a long time John has had lớn overcome this kind of hostility. It"s wasted effort! I didn"t say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way."" If you chose khổng lồ assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to vì chưng it my way,"" you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. Và this, over a whole lifetime, adds up lớn an enormous amount of needless trouble. By taking the trouble khổng lồ tell jokes to lớn the secretaries và 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 và got it reproduced, và then came back. It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort lớn cheer her up, tell her jokes & be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me. By realizing you have to use the system & studying how to lớn get the system to do your work, you learn how lớn adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life. And I think John Tukey paid a terrible price needlessly. He was a genius anyhow, but I think it would have been far better, và far simpler, had he been willing lớn conform a little bit instead of ego asserting. He is going to lớn dress the way he wants all of the time. It applies not only to dress but to lớn a thousand other things; people will continue khổng lồ fight the system. Not that you shouldn"t occasionally! When they moved the library from the middle of Murray Hill khổng lồ the far end, a friend of mine put in a request for a bicycle. Well, the organization was not dumb. They waited awhile and sent back a map of the grounds saying, ``Will you please indicate on this bản đồ what paths you are going to take so we can get an insurance policy covering you."" A few more weeks went by. They then asked, ``Where are you going lớn store the bicycle & how will it be locked so we can bởi so & so."" He finally realized that of course he was going to lớn be red-taped khổng lồ death so he gave in. He rose lớn be the President of Bell Laboratories. Barney Oliver was a good man. He wrote a letter one time to lớn the IEEE. At that time the official shelf space at Bell Labs was so much and the height of the IEEE Proceedings at that time was larger; và since you couldn"t change the size of the official shelf space he wrote this letter to lớn the IEEE Publication person saying, ``Since so many IEEE members were at Bell Labs & since the official space was so high the journal kích cỡ should be changed."" He sent it for his boss"s signature. Back came a carbon with his signature, but he still doesn"t know whether the original was sent or not. I am not saying you shouldn"t make gestures of reform. I am saying that my study of able people is that they don"t get themselves committed to that kind of warfare. They play it a little bit and drop it & get on with their work. Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, và carries it through to lớn warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going lớn tell me that somebody has lớn change the system. I agree; somebody"s has to. Which vày you want to lớn be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to lớn be? Be clear, when you fight the system & struggle with it, what you are doing, how far lớn go out of amusement, & how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to lớn let somebody else do it và you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability lớn both reform the system và become a first-class scientist. On the other hand, we can"t always give in. There are times when a certain amount of rebellion is sensible. I have observed almost all scientists enjoy a certain amount of twitting the system for the sheer love of it. What it comes down to basically is that you cannot be original in one area without having originality in others. Originality is being different. You can"t be an original scientist without having some other original characteristics. But many a scientist has let his quirks in other places make him pay a far higher price than is necessary for the ego satisfaction he or she gets. I"m not against all ego assertion; I"m against some. Another fault is anger. Often a scientist becomes angry, và this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time. Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative. I have already given you several examples, & there are many, many more; how, given the situation, by changing the way I looked at it, I converted what was apparently a defect khổng lồ an asset. I"ll give you another example. I am an egotistical person; there is no doubt about it. I knew that most people who took a sabbatical khổng lồ 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 lớn make myself behave the way I wanted to. I bragged about something so I"d have to lớn perform. I found out many times, lượt thích a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to lớn say, ``Oh yes, I"ll get the answer for you Tuesday,"" not having any idea how to bởi vì it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line và sometimes I failed, but as I said, lượt thích a cornered rat I"m surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn khổng lồ use yourself. I think you need lớn know how to lớn convert a situation from one view khổng lồ another which would increase the chance of success. Now self-delusion in humans is very, very common. There are enumerable ways of you changing a thing and kidding yourself & making it look some other way. When you ask, ``Why didn"t you bởi such and such,"" the person has a thousand alibis. If you look at the history of science, usually these days there are 10 people right there ready, & we pay off for the person who is there first. The other nine fellows say, ``Well, I had the idea but I didn"t vì it & so on and so on."" There are so many alibis. Why weren"t you first? Why didn"t you vì it right? Don"t try an alibi. Don"t try & kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don"t mind. But to yourself try lớn be honest. If you really want khổng lồ be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault lớn an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven"t got enough manpower khổng lồ move into a direction when that"s exactly what you need khổng lồ do? I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint & what was a defect became an asset. 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 & change what is difficult to lớn some other situation which is easily done but is still important, & 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 lớn reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists! (End of the formal part of the talk.) DISCUSSION - QUESTIONS and ANSWERS A. G. Chynoweth: Well that was 50 minutes of concentrated wisdom and observations accumulated over a fantastic career; I lost track of all the observations that were striking home. Some of them are very very timely. One was the plea for more computer capacity; I was hearing nothing but that this morning from several people, over và over again. So that was right on the mark today even though here we are trăng tròn - 30 years after when you were making similar remarks, Dick. I can think of all sorts of lessons that all of us can draw from your talk. And for one, as I walk around the halls in the future I hope I won"t see as many closed doors in Bellcore. That was one observation I thought was very intriguing. Thank you very, very much indeed Dick; that was a wonderful recollection. I"ll now mở cửa it up for questions. I"m sure there are many people who would like to take up on some of the points that Dick was making. Hamming: First let me respond khổng lồ Alan Chynoweth about computing. I had computing in research và for 10 years I kept telling my management, ``Get that !&
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bellcore.com At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California & a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, `You & Your Research" lớn an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members & visitors at the Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986. This talk centered on Hamming"s observations & research on the question ``Why vị so few scientists make significant contributions và so many are forgotten in the long run?"" From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, và why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists và great contributions, & has done introspection & studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, & philosophy. In order to lớn make the information in the talk more widely available, the tape recording that was made of that talk was carefully transcribed. This transcription includes the discussions which followed in the question và answer period. As with any talk, the transcribed version suffers from translation as all the inflections of voice và the gestures of the speaker are lost; one must listen lớn the tape recording khổng lồ recapture that part of the presentation. While the recording of Richard Hamming"s talk was completely intelligible, that of some of the questioner"s remarks were not. Where the tape recording was not intelligible I have added in parentheses my impression of the questioner"s remarks. Where there was a question and I could identify the questioner, I have checked with each to lớn ensure the accuracy of my interpretation of their remarks. INTRODUCTION OF DR. RICHARD W. HAMMING As a speaker in the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, was introduced by Alan G. Chynoweth, Vice President, Applied Research, Bell Communications Research. Alan G. Chynoweth: Greetings colleagues, & also khổng lồ many of our former colleagues from Bell Labs who, I understand, are here to be with us today on what I regard as a particularly felicitous occasion. It gives me very great pleasure indeed khổng lồ introduce to you my old friend và colleague from many many years back, Richard Hamming, or Dick Hamming as he has always been know khổng lồ all of us. Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I"m sure the audience here does not need reminding. He received his early education at the Universities of Chicago và Nebraska, & got his Ph.D. At Illinois; he then joined the Los Alamos project during the war. Afterwards, in 1946, he joined Bell Labs. & that is, of course, where I met Dick - when I joined Bell Labs in their physics research organization. In those days, we were in the habit of lunching together as a physics group, & for some reason this strange fellow from mathematics was always pleased to lớn join us. We were always happy lớn have him with us because he brought so many unorthodox ideas và views. Those lunches were stimulating, I can assure you. While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I"ve always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs & have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing. I think the record speaks for itself. It is too long khổng lồ go through all the details, but let me point out, for example, that he has written seven books & of those seven books which tell of various areas of mathematics & computers & coding and information theory, three are already well into their second edition. That is testimony indeed to the prolific output và the stature of Dick Hamming. I think I last met him - it must have been about ten years ago - at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. As always, he was tremendously entertaining. Just one more example of the provocative thoughts that he comes up with: I remember him saying, ``There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think."" Well, with Dick Hamming around, we don"t need a computer. I think that we are in for an extremely entertaining talk. THE TALK: ``You & Your Research"" by Dr. Richard W. Hamming It"s a pleasure to be here. I doubt if I can live up to the Introduction. The title of my talk is, ``You and Your Research."" It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually vày your research. I could give a talk on the other subject - but it"s not, it"s about you. I"m not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I"m talking about great research. & for the sake of describing great research I"ll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn"t have to lớn gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon"s information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that"s the kind of thing I"m talking about. Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in lớn run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists và physicists could get back lớn business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted lớn know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi và Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do & those who might have done. When I came khổng lồ Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, & there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?"" và ``What is the difference?"" I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to bởi vì this?"" I tried to lớn find out what are the differences. Và that"s what this talk is about. Now, why is this talk important? I think it is important because, as far as I know, each of you has one life to live. Even if you believe in reincarnation it doesn"t vì you any good from one life to lớn the next! Why shouldn"t you vị significant things in this one life, however you define significant? I"m not going to lớn define it - you know what I mean. I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, & I"ve been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to lớn science. In order lớn get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have khổng lồ get you khổng lồ drop modesty & say to yourself, ``Yes, I would lượt thích to bởi first-class work."" Our society frowns on people who phối out to vì really good work. You"re not supposed to; luck is supposed lớn descend on you và you bởi great things by chance. Well, that"s a kind of dumb thing to lớn say. I say, why shouldn"t you set out to vị something significant. You don"t have to lớn tell other people, but shouldn"t you say khổng lồ yourself, ``Yes, I would like to bởi something significant."" In order to lớn get khổng lồ the second stage, I have khổng lồ drop modesty and talk in the first person about what I"ve seen, what I"ve done, và what I"ve heard. I"m going to lớn talk about people, some of whom you know, & I trust that when we leave, you won"t quote me as saying some of the things I said. Let me start not logically, but psychologically. I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It"s all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn"t it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn"t vì just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things & some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, và we"ll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. Và I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind."" và I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn"t. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important & does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you vì is luck, but that you bởi vì something is not. For example, when I came to Bell Labs, I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us did it at the same place and at the same time - it was in the atmosphere. And you can say, ``Yes, it was luck."" On the other hand you can say, ``But why of all the people in Bell Labs then were those the two who did it?"" Yes, it is partly luck, and partly it is the prepared mind; but `partly" is the other thing I"m going to lớn talk about. So, although I"ll come back several more times khổng lồ luck, I want lớn dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you vì chưng great work or not. I claim you have some, but not total, control over it. Và 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."" 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 và had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, ``What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?"" Now he knew that electromagnetic theory says you cannot have a stationary local maximum. But if he moved along with the velocity of light, he would see a local maximum. He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around there, that everything was not right and that the velocity of light had something peculiar. Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments. Now that"s the necessary but not sufficient condition. All of these items I will talk about are both luck and not luck. How about having lots of `brains?" It sounds good. Most of you in this room probably have more than enough brains to do first-class work. But great work is something else than mere brains. Brains are measured in various ways. In mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, typically brains correlates khổng lồ a great extent with the ability to lớn manipulate symbols. & so the typical IQ thử nghiệm is apt to lớn score them fairly high. On the other hand, in other fields it is something different. For example, Bill Pfann, the fellow who did zone melting, came into my office one day. He had this idea dimly in his mind about what he wanted & he had some equations. It was pretty clear khổng lồ me that this man didn"t know much mathematics & he wasn"t really articulate. His problem seemed interesting so I took it trang chủ and did a little work. I finally showed him how lớn run computers so he could compute his own answers. I gave him the power to lớn compute. He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department, but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field. Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away & he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate. & I can cite another person in the same way. I trust he isn"t in the audience, i.e. A fellow named Clogston. I met him when I was working on a problem with John Pierce"s group và I didn"t think he had much. I asked my friends who had been with him at school, ``Was he lượt thích that in graduate school?"" ``Yes,"" they replied. Well I would have fired the fellow, but J. R. Pierce was smart and kept him on. Clogston finally did the Clogston cable. After that there was a steady stream of good ideas. One success brought him confidence & courage. One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up & believe that you can vị important problems, then you can. 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 lớn create a method of coding, but he doesn"t know what to vì so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. Và 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 lớn think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue khổng lồ think. Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to vì it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists vì what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don"t bởi good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics và literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don"t know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect. But let me say why age seems to lớn have the effect it does. In the first place if you vì chưng some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees & unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up & made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, ``I know about this Nobel-Prize effect & I am not going to lớn let it affect me; I am going to lớn remain good old Walter Brattain."" Well I said khổng lồ myself, ``That is nice."" But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems. When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what bởi you vì for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to lớn continue lớn plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try lớn get the big thing right off. Và that isn"t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. 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 & judged by what they did after. Not that they weren"t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there & were only good afterwards. This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever. I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident khổng lồ me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren"t going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go khổng lồ the West Coast & get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I want khổng lồ go or not?"" and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said khổng lồ myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can vì practically everything. Why can"t you make them write programs?"" What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to lớn be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to lớn be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing và say, ``Gee, I"m never going khổng lồ get enough programmers, so how can I ever vì any great programming?"" & there are many other stories of the same kind; Grace Hopper has similar ones. I think that if you look carefully you will see that often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect lớn an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn"t vì chưng a problem finally began to lớn study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, ``But of course, this is what it is"" and got an important result. So ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren"t always the best ones for you. 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 và 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, & 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! What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge và productivity are like compound interest."" Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don"t want lớn give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in & day out lớn get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode"s remark to lớn heart; I spent a good khuyễn mãi giảm giá more of my time for some years trying to lớn work a bit harder và I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don"t lượt thích to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to lớn neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There"s no question about this. On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration."" He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That"s the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn"t get you anywhere. I"ve often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn"t have so much to lớn show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly. There"s another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while khổng lồ discover its importance. Most people lượt thích 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 khổng lồ notice the errors & faults so they can step forward và 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. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true & they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don"t quite fit và they don"t forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to lớn write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you"ve got lớn be sensitive and keep track of those things, và keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed khổng lồ fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down khổng lồ an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed khổng lồ their problem. Those who don"t become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work. Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. & I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally lớn saying, ``creativity comes out of your subconscious."" Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you"re aware your dreams are, to lớn a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed & committed lớn a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to bởi vì but work on your problem. Và so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there"s the answer. For those who don"t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn"t produce the big result. So the way lớn manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don"t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to lớn work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free. Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians và I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn"t learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to lớn Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken Mc
Kay & other people, & I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, & a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them! Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave Mc
Call; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over và said, ``Do you mind if I join you?"" They can"t say no, so I started eating with them for a while. & I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?"" & after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?"" và after some more time I came in one day & said, ``If what you are doing is not important, và if you don"t think it is going khổng lồ lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"" I wasn"t welcomed after that; I had to lớn find somebody else to lớn eat with! That was in the spring. In the fall, Dave Mc
Call stopped me in the hall & said, ``Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. What were the important problems in my field. I haven"t changed my research,"" he says, ``but I think it was well worthwhile."" và I said, ``Thank you Dave,"" và went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a thành viên of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable lớn ask themselves, ``What are the important problems in my field?"" If you bởi not work on an important problem, it"s unlikely you"ll do important work. It"s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, & they keep an eye on wondering how khổng lồ attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem" must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to lớn mention. We didn"t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, và (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we bởi vì not have an attack. It"s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don"t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. 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 & he also doesn"t believe that they will lead to important problems. I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can"t always know exactly where khổng lồ be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. Và even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don"t have to hide in the valley where you"re safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time và so he (or she) doesn"t produce much. It"s that simple. If you want to vì chưng great work, you clearly must work on important problems, & you should have an idea. Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey và others, I finally adopted what I called ``Great Thoughts Time."" When I went lớn lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: ``What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?"", ``How will computers change science?"" For example, I came up with the observation at that time that nine out of ten experiments were done in the lab & one in ten on the computer. I made a remark lớn the vice presidents one time, that it would be reversed, i.e. Nine out of ten experiments would be done on the computer and one in ten in the lab. They knew I was a crazy mathematician and had no sense of reality. I knew they were wrong and they"ve been proved wrong while I have been proved right. They built laboratories when they didn"t need them. I saw that computers were transforming science because I spent a lot of time asking ``What will be the impact of computers on science and how can I change it?"" I asked myself, ``How is it going to lớn change Bell Labs?"" I remarked one time, in the same address, that more than one-half of the people at Bell Labs will be interacting closely with computing machines before I leave. Well, you all have terminals now. I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, & what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can vì important things. Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 và 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. & when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem."" They drop all the other things và get after it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to lớn me but I can"t vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an airport talking to lớn a friend of mine from Los Alamos about how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over in Europe when it did because that got us working on the atomic bomb here in the US. He said ``No; at Berkeley we had gathered a bunch of data; we didn"t get around lớn reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission."" They had it in their hands & they didn"t pursue it. They came in second! The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it và they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity & they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn"t work out, but you don"t have to lớn hit many of them to vì some great science. It"s kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is lớn live a long time! Another trait, it took me a while to lớn notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door xuất hiện or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door lớn your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don"t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you bởi vì is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as lớn what the world is và what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind."" I don"t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately vị important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame. I want to lớn talk on another topic. It is based on the tuy nhiên which I think many of you know, ``It ain"t what you do, it"s the way that you vì it."" I"ll start with an example of my own. I was conned into doing on a digital computer, in the absolute binary days, a problem which the best analog computers couldn"t do. Và I was getting an answer. When I thought carefully & said to lớn myself, ``You know, Hamming, you"re going to have to file a report on this military job; after you spend a lot of money you"re going to have to tài khoản for it và every analog installation is going lớn want the report to see if they can"t find flaws in it."" I was doing the required integration by a rather crummy method, to lớn say the least, but I was getting the answer. And I realized that in truth the problem was not just lớn get the answer; it was to demonstrate for the first time, and beyond question, that I could beat the analog computer on its own ground with a digital machine. I reworked the method of solution, created a theory which was nice & elegant, and changed the way we computed the answer; the results were no different. The published report had an elegant method which was later known for years as ``Hamming"s Method of Integrating Differential Equations."" It is somewhat obsolete now, but for a while it was a very good method. By changing the problem slightly, I did important work rather than trivial work. In the same way, when using the machine up in the attic in the early days, I was solving one problem after another after another; a fair number were successful và there were a few failures. I went trang chủ one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn"t happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another. After quite a while of thinking I decided, ``No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year"s problems, not just the one in front of my face."" By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things và did important work. I attacked the major problem - How bởi vì I conquer machines & do all of next year"s problems when I don"t know what they are going to lớn be? How vì chưng I prepare for it? How vày I bởi vì this one so I"ll be on vị trí cao nhất of it? How vì I obey Newton"s rule? He said, ``If I have seen further than others, it is because I"ve stood on the shoulders of giants."" These days we stand on each other"s feet! You should bởi vì your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I"ve stood on so and so"s shoulders & I saw further."" The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often bởi great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class. Now if you are much of a mathematician you know that the effort to generalize often means that the solution is simple. Often by stopping & saying, ``This is the problem he wants but this is characteristic of so & so. Yes, I can attack the whole class with a far superior method than the particular one because I was earlier embedded in needless detail."" The business of abstraction frequently makes things simple. Furthermore, I filed away the methods & prepared for the future problems. To end this part, I"ll remind you, ``It is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he"s got, and gets the best answer he can."" và I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great giảm giá khuyến mãi of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you"ve done, or you can vì chưng it in such a fashion that the next person has lớn essentially duplicate again what you"ve done. It isn"t just a matter of the job, it"s the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It"s just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. Và it"s much more satisfying & rewarding! I have now come down to lớn a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to bởi a job, you have to sell it. `Selling" khổng lồ a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It"s very ugly; you shouldn"t have to vày it. The world is supposed khổng lồ be waiting, and when you vị something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will mix aside what they are doing, look at what you"ve done, read it, and come back & say, ``Yes, that was good."" I suggest that when you xuất hiện a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles và not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won"t just turn your pages but they will stop & read yours. If they don"t stop và read it, you won"t get credit. There are three things you have to vị in selling. You have lớn learn to write clearly & well so that people will read it, you must learn khổng lồ give reasonably formal talks, & you also must learn to lớn give informal talks. We had a lot of so-called `back room scientists." In a conference, they would keep quiet. Three weeks later after a decision was made they filed a report saying why you should bởi vì so & so. Well, it was too late. They would not stand up right in the middle of a hot conference, in the middle of activity, and say, ``We should bởi this for these reasons."" You need lớn master that form of communication as well as prepared speeches. When I first started, I got practically physically ill while giving a speech, và I was very, very nervous. I realized I either had lớn learn to lớn give speeches smoothly or I would essentially partially cripple my whole career. The first time IBM asked me khổng lồ give a speech in new york one evening, I decided I was going to give a really good speech, a speech that was wanted, not a technical one but a broad one, and at the over if they liked it, I"d quietly say, ``Any time you want one I"ll come in and give you one."" As a result, I got a great giảm giá of practice giving speeches khổng lồ a limited audience và I got over being afraid. Furthermore, I could also then study what methods were effective and what were ineffective. While going to meetings I had already been studying why some papers are remembered & most are not. The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk & wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to lớn give. As a result, many talks are ineffective. The speaker names a topic và suddenly plunges into the details he"s solved. Few people in the audience may follow. You should paint a general picture khổng lồ say why it"s important, và then slowly give a sketch of what was done. Then a larger number of people will say, ``Yes, Joe has done that,"" or ``Mary has done that; I really see where it is; yes, Mary really gave a good talk; I understand what Mary has done."" The tendency is lớn give a highly restricted, safe talk; this is usually ineffective. Furthermore, many talks are filled with far too much information. So I say this idea of selling is obvious. Let me summarize. You"ve got khổng lồ work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe khổng lồ Pasteur"s ``Luck favors the prepared mind."" I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to lớn understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. What was và what was not important. I found in the early days I had believed `this" and yet had spent all week marching in `that" direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why bởi I march in this direction? I either had to lớn change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did & I marched in the direction I thought was important. It"s that easy. Now you might tell me you haven"t got control over what you have to work on. Well, when you first begin, you may not. But once you"re moderately successful, there are more people asking for results than you can deliver and you have some power of choice, but not completely. I"ll tell you a story about that, và it bears on the subject of educating your boss. I had a trùm cuối named Schelkunoff; he was, và still is, a very good friend of mine. Some military person came to me and demanded some answers by Friday. Well, I had already dedicated my computing resources to lớn reducing data on the fly for a group of scientists; I was knee deep in short, small, important problems. This military person wanted me khổng lồ solve his problem by the kết thúc of the day on Friday. I said, ``No, I"ll give it to lớn you Monday. I can work on it over the weekend. I"m not going to bởi vì it now."" He goes down lớn my boss, Schelkunoff, và Schelkunoff says, ``You must run this for him; he"s got khổng lồ have it by Friday."" I tell him, ``Why vày I?""; he says, ``You have to."" I said, ``Fine, Sergei, but you"re sitting in your office Friday afternoon catching the late bus home to watch as this fellow walks out that door."" I gave the military person the answers late Friday afternoon. I then went to Schelkunoff"s office & sat down; as the man goes out I say, ``You see Schelkunoff, this fellow has nothing under his arm; but I gave him the answers."" On Monday morning Schelkunoff called him up và said, ``Did you come in khổng lồ work over the weekend?"" I could hear, as it were, a pause as the fellow ran through his mind of what was going khổng lồ happen; but he knew he would have had to sign in, & he"d better not say he had when he hadn"t, so he said he hadn"t. Ever after that Schelkunoff said, ``You set your deadlines; you can change them."" One lesson was sufficient to lớn educate my quái nhân as to lớn why I didn"t want to vì chưng big jobs that displaced exploratory research & why I was justified in not doing crash jobs which absorb all the research computing facilities. I wanted instead lớn use the facilities lớn compute a large number of small problems. Again, in the early days, I was limited in computing capacity and it was clear, in my area, that a ``mathematician had no use for machines."" But I needed more machine capacity. Every time I had lớn tell some scientist in some other area, ``No I can"t; I haven"t the machine capacity,"" he complained. I said ``Go tell your Vice President that Hamming needs more computing capacity."" After a while I could see what was happening up there at the top; many people said khổng lồ my Vice President, ``Your man needs more computing capacity."" I got it! I also did a second thing. When I loaned what little programming power nguồn we had to help in the early days of computing, I said, ``We are not getting the recognition for our programmers that they deserve. When you publish a paper you will thank that programmer or you aren"t getting any more help from me. That programmer is going lớn be thanked by name; she"s worked hard."" I waited a couple of years. I then went through a year of BSTJ articles and counted what fraction thanked some programmer. I took it into the boss và said, ``That"s the central role computing is playing in Bell Labs; if the BSTJ is important, that"s how important computing is."" He had to give in. You can educate your bosses. It"s a hard job. In this talk I"m only viewing from the bottom up; I"m not viewing from the đứng top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of đứng đầu management. You have to sell your ideas there also. Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to lớn be a great scientist worth it?"" to answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, & knowing it, is as good as wine, women and tuy nhiên put together,"" or if it"s a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and tuy vậy put together."" và if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying khổng lồ participate in those moments of discovery. They"re always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared khổng lồ go out and ask those who didn"t do great work how they felt about the matter. It"s a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle khổng lồ try & do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle khổng lồ make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion. I"ve told you how to vị it. It is so easy, so why vày so many people, with all their talents, fail? For example, my opinion, khổng lồ this day, is that there are in the mathematics department at Bell Labs quite a few people far more able & far better endowed than I, but they didn"t produce as much. Some of them did produce more than I did; Shannon produced more than I did, và some others produced a lot, but I was highly productive against a lot of other fellows who were better equipped. Why is it so? What happened to lớn them? Why bởi vì so many of the people who have great promise, fail? Well, one of the reasons is drive & commitment. The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill & dabble in it, who work during the day & go home and bởi other things & come back & work the next day. They don"t have the deep commitment that is apparently necessary for really first-class work. They turn out lots of good work, but we were talking, remember, about first-class work. There is a difference. Good people, very talented people, almost always turn out good work. We"re talking about the outstanding work, the type of work that gets the Nobel Prize and gets recognition. The second thing is, I think, the problem of personality defects. Now I"ll cite a fellow whom I met out in Irvine. He had been the head of a computing center and he was temporarily on assignment as a special assistant khổng lồ the president of the university. It was obvious he had a job with a great future. He took me into his office one time and showed me his method of getting letters done and how he took care of his correspondence. He pointed out how inefficient the secretary was. He kept all his letters stacked around there; he knew where everything was. & he would, on his word processor, get the letter out. He was bragging how marvelous it was và how he could get so much more work done without the secretary"s interference. Well, behind his back, I talked to the secretary. The secretary said, ``Of course I can"t help him; I don"t get his mail. He won"t give me the stuff to lớn log in; I don"t know where he puts it on the floor. Of course I can"t help him."" So I went khổng lồ him và said, ``Look, if you adopt the present method & do what you can do single-handedly, you can go just that far & no farther than you can bởi vì single-handedly. If you will learn to lớn work with the system, you can go as far as the system will tư vấn you."" And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control & was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system. You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system & take advantage of all the system has khổng lồ offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to lớn use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to lớn use the system pretty well, và you can learn how khổng lồ get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No", you just go lớn your boss & get a `No" easy. If you want to do something, don"t ask, bởi it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don"t give him a chance to tell you `No". But if you want a `No", it"s easy lớn get a `No". Another personality defect is ego assertion và I"ll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos & in the early days I was using a machine in thành phố new york at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo & all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I mix out khổng lồ measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to lớn 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 lớn find someone to slip in, but they go out và 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 khổng lồ just that - I wasn"t dressing properly. I had to lớn make the decision - was I going lớn assert my ego và dress the way I wanted to & have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going lớn appear khổng lồ conform better? I decided I would make an effort khổng lồ appear khổng lồ conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. Và now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people. You should dress according to lớn the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going khổng lồ give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo & an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not khổng lồ let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to lớn be able to bởi vì this, that, or the other thing, & they pay a steady price. John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office và it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man và he had better listen. For a long time John has had lớn overcome this kind of hostility. It"s wasted effort! I didn"t say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way."" If you chose khổng lồ assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to vì chưng it my way,"" you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. Và this, over a whole lifetime, adds up lớn an enormous amount of needless trouble. By taking the trouble khổng lồ tell jokes to lớn the secretaries và 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 và got it reproduced, và then came back. It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort lớn cheer her up, tell her jokes & be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me. By realizing you have to use the system & studying how to lớn get the system to do your work, you learn how lớn adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life. And I think John Tukey paid a terrible price needlessly. He was a genius anyhow, but I think it would have been far better, và far simpler, had he been willing lớn conform a little bit instead of ego asserting. He is going to lớn dress the way he wants all of the time. It applies not only to dress but to lớn a thousand other things; people will continue khổng lồ fight the system. Not that you shouldn"t occasionally! When they moved the library from the middle of Murray Hill khổng lồ the far end, a friend of mine put in a request for a bicycle. Well, the organization was not dumb. They waited awhile and sent back a map of the grounds saying, ``Will you please indicate on this bản đồ what paths you are going to take so we can get an insurance policy covering you."" A few more weeks went by. They then asked, ``Where are you going lớn store the bicycle & how will it be locked so we can bởi so & so."" He finally realized that of course he was going to lớn be red-taped khổng lồ death so he gave in. He rose lớn be the President of Bell Laboratories. Barney Oliver was a good man. He wrote a letter one time to lớn the IEEE. At that time the official shelf space at Bell Labs was so much and the height of the IEEE Proceedings at that time was larger; và since you couldn"t change the size of the official shelf space he wrote this letter to lớn the IEEE Publication person saying, ``Since so many IEEE members were at Bell Labs & since the official space was so high the journal kích cỡ should be changed."" He sent it for his boss"s signature. Back came a carbon with his signature, but he still doesn"t know whether the original was sent or not. I am not saying you shouldn"t make gestures of reform. I am saying that my study of able people is that they don"t get themselves committed to that kind of warfare. They play it a little bit and drop it & get on with their work. Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, và carries it through to lớn warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going lớn tell me that somebody has lớn change the system. I agree; somebody"s has to. Which vày you want to lớn be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to lớn be? Be clear, when you fight the system & struggle with it, what you are doing, how far lớn go out of amusement, & how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to lớn let somebody else do it và you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability lớn both reform the system và become a first-class scientist. On the other hand, we can"t always give in. There are times when a certain amount of rebellion is sensible. I have observed almost all scientists enjoy a certain amount of twitting the system for the sheer love of it. What it comes down to basically is that you cannot be original in one area without having originality in others. Originality is being different. You can"t be an original scientist without having some other original characteristics. But many a scientist has let his quirks in other places make him pay a far higher price than is necessary for the ego satisfaction he or she gets. I"m not against all ego assertion; I"m against some. Another fault is anger. Often a scientist becomes angry, và this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time. Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative. I have already given you several examples, & there are many, many more; how, given the situation, by changing the way I looked at it, I converted what was apparently a defect khổng lồ an asset. I"ll give you another example. I am an egotistical person; there is no doubt about it. I knew that most people who took a sabbatical khổng lồ 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 lớn make myself behave the way I wanted to. I bragged about something so I"d have to lớn perform. I found out many times, lượt thích a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to lớn say, ``Oh yes, I"ll get the answer for you Tuesday,"" not having any idea how to bởi vì it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line và sometimes I failed, but as I said, lượt thích a cornered rat I"m surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn khổng lồ use yourself. I think you need lớn know how to lớn convert a situation from one view khổng lồ another which would increase the chance of success. Now self-delusion in humans is very, very common. There are enumerable ways of you changing a thing and kidding yourself & making it look some other way. When you ask, ``Why didn"t you bởi such and such,"" the person has a thousand alibis. If you look at the history of science, usually these days there are 10 people right there ready, & we pay off for the person who is there first. The other nine fellows say, ``Well, I had the idea but I didn"t vì it & so on and so on."" There are so many alibis. Why weren"t you first? Why didn"t you vì it right? Don"t try an alibi. Don"t try & kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don"t mind. But to yourself try lớn be honest. If you really want khổng lồ be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault lớn an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven"t got enough manpower khổng lồ move into a direction when that"s exactly what you need khổng lồ do? I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint & what was a defect became an asset. 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 & change what is difficult to lớn some other situation which is easily done but is still important, & 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 lớn reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists! (End of the formal part of the talk.) DISCUSSION - QUESTIONS and ANSWERS A. G. Chynoweth: Well that was 50 minutes of concentrated wisdom and observations accumulated over a fantastic career; I lost track of all the observations that were striking home. Some of them are very very timely. One was the plea for more computer capacity; I was hearing nothing but that this morning from several people, over và over again. So that was right on the mark today even though here we are trăng tròn - 30 years after when you were making similar remarks, Dick. I can think of all sorts of lessons that all of us can draw from your talk. And for one, as I walk around the halls in the future I hope I won"t see as many closed doors in Bellcore. That was one observation I thought was very intriguing. Thank you very, very much indeed Dick; that was a wonderful recollection. I"ll now mở cửa it up for questions. I"m sure there are many people who would like to take up on some of the points that Dick was making. Hamming: First let me respond khổng lồ Alan Chynoweth about computing. I had computing in research và for 10 years I kept telling my management, ``Get that !&
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