The Art of Doing Science and Engineering review

Richard Hamming's book is based on a course he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in the late 1980s, after a long career at Bell Labs where he made foundational contributions to information theory and computer science — the Hamming distance, Hamming codes, and various contributions to numerical methods all bear his name. The book is not a textbook. It is an attempt to teach something harder: how to have a successful scientific career, how to do work that matters, and how to think about problems so that you work on the right ones.

Hamming's central question is why some scientists do great work and others, equally intelligent and trained, do ordinary work. His answer involves several factors: the courage to work on important problems rather than safe ones, the willingness to tolerate ambiguity while pursuing a clear long-term vision, and what he calls "the open door" policy — knowing enough about adjacent fields that luck, when it arrives, finds you prepared. He famously asked colleagues at Bell Labs, "What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on them?" Many found the question annoying. Hamming thought annoyance was the point.