Hamming - Por que tão poucos cientistas fazem contribuições significantes e tantos são esquecidos no longo prazo?

"The purpose of Computation is insight, not numbers." Richard W. Hamming

Nessa questão, minha opinião pessoal é que a distância de Hamming entre o cientista médio e Hamming é grande...

Richard Hamming
``You and Your Research''
Transcription of the
Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar
7 March 1986
J. F. Kaiser
Bell Communications Research
445 South Street
Morristown, NJ 07962-1910

At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a
Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, You and Your Research to an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members and visitors at the Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986.

his talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question ``Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?'' From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven't got enough manpower to move into a direction when that's exactly what you need to do?I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint and what was a defect became an asset.

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!