Book

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

Richard W. Hamming and Bret Victor

Last highlighted November 25, 2025 ← All highlights

Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past. (Location 150)
Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. (Location 230)
Added to the problem of the growth of new knowledge is the obsolescence of old knowledge. It is claimed by many the half-life of the technical knowledge you just learned in school is about 15 years—in 15 years half of it will be obsolete (either we will have gone in other directions or will have replaced it with new material). (Location 274)
In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. (Location 301)
Furthermore, both the science and the engineering you will need for your future will more and more often be created after you left school. Sorry! But you will simply have to actively master on your own the many new emerging fields as they arise, without having the luxury of being passively taught. (Location 308)
unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions, (Location 342)
In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen. (Location 348)
In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen? In a sense the first is science—what is possible. The second is engineering—what are the human factors which choose the one future that does happen from the ensemble of all possible futures. The third is ethics, morals, or whatever other word you wish to apply to value judgments. (Location 359)
am preaching the message that, with apparently only one life to live on this earth, you ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably—that the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal for your life. It has often been observed the true gain is in the struggle and not in the achievement—a life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living. This, it must be observed, is an opinion and not a fact, but it is based on observing many people’s lives and speculating on their total happiness rather than the moment-to-moment pleasures they enjoyed. (Location 386)
much of what is now taught is based on the past, and has ignored the computer revolution and our responses to some of the evils the revolution has brought; the gains are generally clear to management, the evils are less so. (Location 523)
you will be clear the machine processes bits of information according other bits, and as far as the machine is concerned there is no meaning to anything which happens—it is we who attach meaning to the bits. The machine is a “machine” in the classical sense; it does what it does and nothing else (unless it malfunctions). (Location 756)
We very soon got the idea of reusable software, as it is now called. Indeed, Babbage had the idea. We wrote mathematical libraries to reuse blocks of code. But an absolute address library meant each time the library routine was used it had to occupy the same locations in storage. When the complete library became too large we had to go to relocatable programs. The necessary programming tricks were in the von Neumann reports, which were never formally published. (Location 811)
fortran, meaning formula translation, was proposed by Backus and friends, and again was opposed by almost all programmers. First, it was said it could not be done. Second, if it could be done, it would be too wasteful of machine time and capacity. Third, even if it did work, no respectable programmer would use it—it was only for sissies! (Location 834)
fortran was successful far beyond anyone’s expectations because of the psychological fact it was just what its name implied—formula translation of the things one had always done in school; it did not require learning a new set of ways of thinking. (Location 858)
History tends to be charitable in this matter. It gives credit for understanding what something means when we first do it. But there is a wise saying, “Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do.” (Location 885)
To see this difference, try writing dialogue and then read how it sounds. Almost no one can write dialogue so that it sounds right, and when it sounds right it is still not the spoken language. (Location 940)
One trouble with much of programming is simply that often there is not a well-defined job to be done; rather, the programming process itself will gradually discover what the problem is! (Location 996)
Many studies have shown programmers differ in productivity, from worst to best, by much more than a factor of ten. From this I long ago concluded the best policy is to pay your good programmers very well but regularly fire the poorer ones—if you can get away with it! (Location 1012)
You should always feel some excitement when you give a talk, since even the best actors and actresses usually have some stage fright. Your excitement tends to be communicated to the audience, and if you seem to be perfectly relaxed, then the audience also relaxes and may fall asleep! (Location 1069)
An after-dinner speech requires, generally, three good jokes: one at the beginning, one in the middle, and a closing one so that they will at least remember one joke; all jokes of course told well. I had to find my own style of joke telling, and I practiced it by telling jokes to secretaries. (Location 1075)
you have only to watch and note the universality of computers in your life. Of course, they will further increase as time goes on—the same simple general-purpose computer can do so many special-purpose jobs, it is seldom that a special-purpose chip is wanted. (Location 1187)
As you go on in your careers you should examine the applications which succeed and those which fail; try to learn how to distinguish between them; try to understand the situations which produce successes and those which almost guarantee failure. (Location 1205)
It seems to me in the long run it is on the intellectual side of life that machines can most contribute to the quality of life. (Location 1258)
As to the soul, in the late Middle Ages some people, wanting to know when the soul departed from the dead body, put a dying man on a scale and watched for the sudden change in weight, but all they saw was a slow loss as the body decayed—apparently the soul, which they were sure the man had, did not have material weight. (Location 1302)
Year after year such discussions are generally quite hostile to machines, though it is getting less so every year. They often start with remarks such as, “I would not want to have my life depend on a machine,” to which the reply is, “You are opposed to using pacemakers to keep people alive?” (Location 1631)
It is the combination of man and machine which is important, and not the supposed conflict which arises from their all too human egos. (Location 1650)
Notice first this essential step happened only because there was a great deal of emotional stress on me at the moment, and this is characteristic of most great discoveries. Working calmly will let you elaborate and extend things, but the breakthroughs generally come only after great frustration and emotional involvement. The calm, cool, uninvolved researcher seldom makes really great new steps. (Location 2180)
First, I wanted to be honest with you and show you how easy, if you will follow Pasteur’s rule that “luck favors the prepared mind,” it is to succeed by merely preparing yourself to succeed. (Location 2334)
But so far as I can see, life presents you with many, many opportunities for doing great things (define them as you will) and the prepared person usually hits one or more successes, and the unprepared person will miss almost every time. (Location 2344)
You establish in yourself the style of doing great things, and then when opportunity comes you almost automatically respond with greatness in your actions. You have trained yourself to think and act in the proper ways. (Location 2348)
There is one nasty thing to be mentioned, however: what it takes to be great in one age is not what is required in the next one. Thus you, in preparing yourself for future greatness (and the possibility of greatness is more common and easy to achieve than you think, since it is not common to recognize greatness when it happens under one’s nose), you have to think of the nature of the future you will live in. The past is a partial guide, and about the only one you have besides history is the constant use of your own imagination. Again, a random walk of random decisions will not get you anywhere near as far as those taken with your own vision of what your future should be. (Location 2350)