News and Events
You and Your Research by Dr. Richard W. Hamming
by Mark Henry, Inc. on 11/13/12
Hamming highlights the importance of thinking about tomorrow through looking outside the box. The key to achieving the outside the box perspective is meeting and discussing topics that are not within your current expertise. Hamming relates how he a mathematics expert at Bell Laboratories spent his lunchtime with the physicists, chemist, and engineers. Always trying to understand what the important problems of their respective fields are and what specifically each individual is working to solve. Hamming believes that knowledge has a 17-year half-life. That is, half of all current knowledge will be obsolete or invalided in 17 years. As such, it is imperative that the individual consider what tomorrow will bring and what, if accomplished today, will aid in achieving that vision of tomorrow. Hamming lived Pasteur's "Luck favors the prepared mind" by spending Friday afternoons trying to understand the bigger problems in the field. Reference Hamming, R. W. (1986, March 7). You and Your Research Dr. Richard W. Hamming. Transcript by Kaiser, J. F. of lecture presented at the Bell Communications Research, 435 South Street, Room 2E-354, Morristown, NJ 07980, Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series.
