Approaches to Life

I recently read a transcript in Paul Graham’s blog of a talk by Richard Hamming on March 1986 at Bellcore. The talk is titled “You and Your Research.” Hamming was a mathematician who in his lifetime made several field-changing contributions to computer science. According to Wikipedia, Hamming joined “the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project’s physicists.” In 1946, after World War II, he joined Bell Labs. “Over the next fifteen years, he was involved in nearly all of the laboratories’ most prominent achievements.” He was awarded the Turing Award in 1968. Hamming’s talk is about achieving significant things. The major objection to setting out to do great work—says Hamming—is that people think that great things are mostly done by luck. Hamming counterargues by quoting Pasteur: luck favors the prepared mind. Usually, he adds, people who do great things have some…