What is The Art of Doing Science and Engineering about?

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.

The technical chapters cover digital filtering, information theory, coding theory, computer simulations, and artificial intelligence as it was understood in 1990. These sections age variably. The AI chapters are more historical document than current guide, though Hamming's methodological skepticism about what machines can actually do is worth reading alongside contemporary claims. The information theory and error-correcting code chapters hold up better, both because Hamming knew the material intimately and because the ideas are foundational.

What gives the book unusual staying power is the recurring thread about the character of good thinking. Hamming returns repeatedly to the same themes: study your failures as carefully as your successes, convert fuzzy problems into well-defined ones before trying to solve them, and recognize that style — how you present ideas — is not separate from the ideas themselves. The book is uneven in structure and sometimes repetitive, reflecting its origins as a lecture series, but no other book covers this particular territory in quite this way. It is a manual for thinking well written by someone who spent forty years doing it.