The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

I am concerned with educating and not training you.

Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it.

“Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do.”

In practice you may actually be better off to pay the worst to stay home and not get in the way of the more capable (and I am serious)!

An examination of books on programming suggests most of the authors are not good programmers!

Science has traditionally appealed to experimental evidence and not idle words, and so far science seems to have been more effective than philosophy in improving our way of life. The future can, of course, be different.

However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers.

the area of thinking, maybe we have confused what is done with the way it is done, and this may be the source of much of our confusion in ai.

We simply do not know what we are talking about; the very words are not defined, nor do they seem definable in the near future.

The calm, cool, uninvolved researcher seldom makes really great new steps.

functional equation,

the complex exponentials; they are the eigenfunctions of linear, time-invariant, equally spaced sampled systems.

prolate

obdurate

argot,

vitiates

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

An expert is one who knows everything about nothing; a generalist knows nothing about everything.

If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.

In some respects the expert is the curse of our society,

There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later,

90% of the time, the next independent measurement will fall outside the previous 90% confidence limits!

Morgenstern’s On the Accuracy of Economic Measurements, Princeton Press, 2nd ed.

have repeatedly said to you: the human animal was not designed to be reliable; it cannot count accurately, it can do little or nothing repetitive with great accuracy.

small samples carefully taken are better than large samples poorly done—better

the average adult has one breast and one testicle, but that does not represent the average person in our society.

The first rule of systems engineering is: If you optimize the components, you will probably ruin the system performance.

part of the system design problem is that the system will be constantly upgraded in ways you do not now know in any detail!

The closer you meet specifications, the worse the performance will be when overloaded.

Hence good design generally includes the graceful decay of performance when the specifications are exceeded.

One Man’s Systems Engineering by H.R. Westerman (1975),

one of the functions of the systems engineer to block most of the local optimization of the individuals of the system and reach for the global optimization for the system.

hat sometimes

observed the correlation. I suspect the open mind leads to the