Richard W. Hamming once said, “If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.”
It seems so logical when it’s spelled out for us. But Hamming, inventor of error detecting and correcting computer codes that carry his name, found it critical to frequently remind his coworkers, students, and other scientists.
“Hamming encouraged people to stand back from minutiae and think about the larger problems,” said Cynthia Irvine, professor of computer science and chair of the cyber academic group at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif. She also worked part of the same time at the NPS in California where Hamming taught from 1976 until his death in 1998.
“He believed it’s really important to think about the right problem to solve,” she said. “If you pick the right problem you can do something more important than making incremental contributions.”
“Big ideas” really excited Hamming. Noted Bruce MacLennan, who was also a professor at NPS when Hamming was there, “He was very interested in the broader aspect of everything.”
Friday Afternoons
“He was a great one for walking and thinking,” said MacLennan. The two of them often could be found walking in the gardens surrounding NPS or heading to a restaurant on the lake. “He believed it was really important to always reserve Friday afternoons for thinking great thoughts. He’d discuss or think about lofty science or broader scientific issues.”
In Hamming’s oft-given “You and Your Research” speech, he recalled how over time at Bell Labs he moved from one lunch table group to another, continually seeking intellectual challenges and simultaneously challenging his coworkers.
Finally, among a group of chemists, he asked what the important chemistry issues were. The next week he asked the chemists if they were working on those issues, and they told him no.
Lastly, he asked, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?” He had to find a different lunch table group after that!
Hamming also studied what made people great so he and others could also be great. “Learn from the masters,” was one of his philosophies. He also liked, said MacLennan, to quote Socrates, saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Open Doors
Entranced with why people of apparently equal intelligence had very different degrees of success, he set about to study their behavior. He concluded it was from both focusing on big ideas and whether they worked with an office door open or closed!
“If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most,” said Hamming in an 1986 address at Bellcore.
“But 10 years later, somehow you don’t know quite what problems are worth working on,” he continued. “All the hard work you do 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 to what the world is and what might be important.”
Thus, Hamming believed exchanging ideas with others was vital to one’s success. He made it a habit to drop into other offices and share ideas.
“I always remember, he would come into my office and try to solve a problem,” said MacLennan. “I had a very big blackboard, and he’d start on one side, write down some integral, say, ‘I ain’t afraid of nothin’,’ and start working on it. So, now, when I start a big problem, I say, ‘I ain’t afraid of nothin’,’ and dive into it.”
Irvine said that during several of Hamming’s frequent visits to her office, he’d sit in an orange chair, eventually called “Hamming’s chair,” and raise the topic of “unthinkable thoughts”—not thoughts of some tragedy, but wondering if humans were incapable of thinking certain ways.
“He liked to ponder things about the physical universe that, because of our physical nature, we could not think about. Of course he couldn’t think the unthinkable thoughts, but he liked to think there were such possibilities. He had a very philosophical perspective on the limitations of humans and our understanding of the universe,” Irvine said.
“Or, he would have some topic, maybe calculus, or an aspect of information technology, and he would be on the topic a couple of weeks, as it gestates, and he would try it out with various people,” remembered Irvine.
Computing’s Growing Role
Hamming was born on Feb. 11, 1915, in Chicago, Ill. He received his BS from the University of Chicago in 1937, followed by an MS at the University of Nebraska and his PhD in mathematics in 1942 from the University of Illinois.
cc. A year later he was at Bell Labs, where he stayed until his 1976 move to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. He worked there mentoring and teaching until his death in January 1998, a month shy of 83.