Here my notes from lecture of Richard Hamming:
* I am concern about the style
* Difference between whose who do and whose who don't do significant things is A MATTER OF STYLE.
* You must experience not talk !
* Try to do something more than just average person.
* You must to do the work; you have to tear what you heard and read, think about that carefully, discuss with friends and see what you can adapt yourself.
* There is not one style to be successful. You have to find style which fit you.
* Painting is good example: if you copy master style exactly you won't became great painter.
* What you made great is not appropriate for next generations
* Education is WHAT, WHEN and WHY to do things, training is HOW to do things.
* You need both theory to guide you and skills and technic to do, one without the other isn't to good.
* From Newton times to ours we double the knowledge every 17 years.
* Nowadays we see exponential growth of number of scientists
* Quick modeling - back envelop calculation - fastest way to check if someone talking non-sense on TV.
* Learning to learn - something what was learnt will be obsolete
* He spent lifetime getting background knowledge. You have to have background knowledge enough to penetrate jargon.
* Fundamentals - from the fundamentals you can drive the rest of the field. There been around for sometime and gone entirely or partly. e.g. the fundamentals of amplification of vacuum tubes doesn't count now but Nuiquist formula for gain is still valid.
* Science vs. Engineering
* Science - you should not know what you are doing. Science suppose to be exploration what you don't know.
* Engineering - you should do it if you know what you are doing.
* Nothing is pure, science involve great deal of engineering, engineering involve great deal of new material.
* Go from idle to develop items, get them on the market rapidly.
* Short term predictions are optimistic, long term predictions are pessimistic, reason is very simple - nobody believes in geometry progression.
* Predictive future is VERY VERY hard business.
* You live long enough and do enough and you end up in history books ;-)
* History is a bonk - history is rarely reported correctly. Several witness report different things, no reliable report.
* Individuals do matter
* The past is less determined than historian like to make, and the future is less open-ended as you like to believe.
* The future get great possibilities for you.
* Unforeseen inventions can ruin everything e.g. transistor killed vacuum tubes.
* All of your life takes place in the social society which has restraints. The future technologies would be less determined about what technology ca do, than social, legal and other restrains what we can do.
* Social conventions are going to stop great things may happening.
* Drunken sailor - in N-steps typically he get square root of distance N e.g 100-steps is equal 10 distance.In another hand if there is pretty girl other-where he got a distance proportional to N.
* If I can create in you a vision of where you are headed, you may a make progress proportional to N.
* If you do not have a vision you are wobble as a drunken sailor and get very little.
* One of my major purposes to get you to form reasonable vision of what you are going to do in your future, what kind of person you are going to be.
* How can I know the future? It doesn't matter much, what goal you set? Want to go that way or that way? If you have a goal you get somewhere near if not you are drunken sailor.
* Try to achieve your goal, to make something important rather just drifting.
* It's comfortable drift through the life.
* In spite of different departments (Math, Physics, Chemistry, History etc.) there is essential unity of all knowledge. When you face a different problem of unknown type. You have to find the answer and knowledge is pretty homogenous then it's no longer divided into courses, departments etc.
* Knowledge is sort of homogenous body which we specialized with certain names but it's all reconnected together.
* One life to live you warn to be more then just get by.
* The struggle to success it's what makes you what you will be, there is no escape in living with yourself in old age.
* You stuck with yourself and at old age you cannot change yourself as much as you can change as you are younger be such kind of person you wish to be an old age and start now to be such kind of person.
* Take yourself on hand and manage yourself to be a person you wish to be, to achieve the goals you wish and be more articulate than just idle drifting drunken sailor.
* The unexamined life is not worth living.
The end
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