Top 35 Richard Hamming Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”

— Richard Hamming

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2. “Luck favors the prepared mind.”

— Richard Hamming

3. “Newton 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!”

— Richard Hamming

4. “Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.”

— Richard Hamming

5. “It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.”

— Richard Hamming

6. “True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it’s spelled with a lower case letter.”

— Richard Hamming

7. “The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.”

— Richard Hamming

8. “It may be said “In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn’t be doing it.” In a sense, if the answer turns out to be exactly what you expected, then you have learned nothing new, although you may have had your confidence increased somewhat.”

— Richard Hamming

9. “If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you’ll do important work.”

— Richard Hamming

10. “Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.”

— Richard Hamming

11. “Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.”

— Richard Hamming

12. “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.”

— Richard Hamming

13. “What are the important problems of your field?”

— Richard Hamming

14. “The real problem is what can man and machine do together and not in competition.”

— Richard Hamming

15. “There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.”

— Richard Hamming

16. “Science is concerned with what is possible while engineering is concerned with choosing, from among the many possible ways, one that meets a number of often poorly stated economic and practical objectives.”

— Richard Hamming

17. “One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.”

— Richard Hamming

18. “One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.”

— Richard Hamming

19. “Typing is no substitute for thinking.”

— Richard Hamming

20. “Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.”

— Richard Hamming

21. “Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the study of failures. There are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient.”

— Richard Hamming

22. “You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don’t mind. But to yourself try to be honest.”

— Richard Hamming

23. “It is not easy to become an educated person.”

— Richard Hamming

24. “In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are responsible for what you believe.”

— Richard Hamming

25. “Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.”

— Richard Hamming

26. “If the prior distribution, at which I am frankly guessing, has little or no effect on the result, then why bother; and if it has a large effect, then since I do not know what I am doing how would I dare act on the conclusions drawn?”

— Richard Hamming

27. “Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.”

— Richard Hamming

28. “Computer scientists stand on each other’s feet.”

— Richard Hamming

29. “The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.”

— Richard Hamming

30. “While the problem of ai can be viewed as, “Which of all the things humans do can machines also do?,” I would prefer to ask the question in another form: “Of all of life’s burdens, which are those machines can relieve, or significantly ease, for us?”

— Richard Hamming

31. “Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.”

— Richard Hamming

32. “In closing I want to remind you yet again of Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” Yes, it is a matter of luck just what you do; it is much less luck you will do something if you prepare yourself to succeed. “Creativity” is just another name for the great successes which make a difference in history.”

— Richard Hamming

33. “Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance.”

— Richard Hamming

34. “Moral: to the extent you can choose, work on problems you think will be important.”

— Richard Hamming

35. “A second reason the systems engineer’s design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves. Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped with – thus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution.”

— Richard Hamming

36. “Assuming you rise to the top, please remember: what made you great may not be appropriate for the next generation.”

— Richard Hamming