A Stroke of Genius: Striving for Greatness in All You Do
by R. W. Hamming
About the author:
Dr. Richard Hamming is best known for the Hamming code, Hamming distance and
the Hamming spectral window along with numerical methods
Little has been written on managing your own research (and very little on avoiding other
people managing your research); however, your research is much more under your
control than you may realize.
We are concerned with great research here. Work that will get wide recognition, perhaps
even wine Nobel Prize. As most people realize, the average published paper is read by
the author, the referee, and perhaps one other person. Classic papers are read by
thousands. We are concerned with research that will matter in the long run and become
more than a footnote in history.
If you are to do important work then you must work on the right problem at the right time
and in the right way. Without any one of the three, you may do good work but you will
almost certainly miss real greatness.
Greatness is a matter of style. For example, after learning the elements of painting, you
study under a master. While studying you pay attention to what the master says in
discussing your work, but you know that if you are to achieve greatness then you must
find your own style. Furthermore, a successful style in one age is not necessarily
appropriate for another age. Cubism would not have gone over big during the realism
period.
Similarly, there is no simple formula for doing great science or engineering, I can only
talk around the topic. The topic is important because, so far as we have any solid
evidence, you have but one life to live. Under these circumstances it seems better to live a
life in which you do important things (important in your eyes, of course) than to merely
live out your life. No sense frittering away your life on things that will not even appear in
the footnotes.
choosing the problem
I begin with the choice of problem. Most scientists spend almost all of their time working
on problems that even they admit are neither great or are likely to lead to great work;
hence, almost surely, they will not do important work. Note that importance of the results
of a solution does not make the problem important. In all the 30 years I spent at Bell
Telephone Laboratories (before it was broken up) no one to my knowledge worked on
