Hamming: You and Your Research

A senior lecturer in my research group, Gavin Brown (who incidentally works with his door open on occasion) posted up a printed copy of the transcript of a presentation Richard Hamming gave at Bell Labs (long after he had retired) in 1986. I’m glad he posted it up, as otherwise I wouldn’t have read it just now.

I heard this quote of Hamming’s recently and wondered where it came from. Turns out it came from the talk:

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.

Makes you think! I’m not working on the kind of problems that Hamming would say are important but when I heard that quote I was immediately wondering about the importance of my topic and came to the conclusion that it was important in a somewhat small, way which I daresay is common of a lot of PhD topics (after all, there’s a strict time limit).

Some quotes from the talk that resonated with me:

If you believe too much, you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you’ll never get started.

Quoting Pasteur:

Luck favours the prepared mind.

On the role of the subconscious and immersing yourself in the problem:

For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention — you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

The last one is referring to what your subconscious does when you sleep. Hamming acknowledges that we don’t understand the subconscious well but that many have concluded that it can be a major source of inspiration. I myself have been surprised when working for days or weeks on a problem how you can wake up one day, look at the same pages you’ve been staring at the whole time and suddenly see something new in them. In those times it has always been a problem which has vexed me to the point where I’m thinking about it constantly, while walking to and from university (or indeed anywhere), in concerts etc. so my experience appears to agree with Hamming’s, though it would be a bit surprising if immersing yourself in a problem was a bad thing, right?

A couple of other points that may strike you as being obvious, but I can’t say I keep them in mind enough personally:

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed says, “Yes, I’ve stood on so and so’s shoulders and I saw further”. The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision ‘No’, you just go to your boss and get a ‘No’ easy. If you want to do something, don’t ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don’t give him a chance to tell you ‘No’. But if you want a ‘No’, it’s easy to get a ‘No’.

That last one reminds me of the saying, “it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” although he seems to be talking more about turning up in your bosses office Monday morning with some results which you didn’t have ‘permission’ to commit time to. I’ve done this and was reprimanded quite harshly (though only verbally), though that was my fault for not making it clear that it had been done on my own time. Well worth doing if you believe it’s the right thing to do.

Then, as to why he didn’t seem to be getting assigned the computer time he needed by the secretaries:

Answer, I wasn’t dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that—I wasn’t dressing properly. I had to make the decision—was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better?

Put another way: “The appearance of conforming gets you a long way”. Effort expended getting past people’s preconceptions just because you, say, dress casually, is wasted effort! Again even my limited personal experience has shown the benefit of this kind of conformance; it needn’t even be painful if it’s just a case of putting on a nice shirt and tie!

Here’s the full transcript (including Q&A). A quick search didn’t turn up the audio unfortunately; if anyone knows if it’s available please post below.

Research is Communication

The following is based on ideas presented in a lecture on academic writing which is part of a compulsory course for PhD students in the Computer Science department at the University of Manchester.

Research is communication. If you’re not writing, you’re not doing research. A strong statement, but hard to argue with when you consider that if you had a great idea but failed to share it with even one person, you might as well not have bothered.

Here’s one way in which you might increase your output while simultaneously sharing your work with more people: when you have a new idea, start writing it up as a paper before diving into the implementation. Doing so should make apparent any holes in the hypothesis and will force you to be clear about what it is that you are aiming to investigate.

As for the sharing, you now have an actual artifact that you can show people and get feedback on. In the draft paper you will have outlined the problem, approach etc. clearly and so it should now be in a form where a colleague could understand the content and give useful feedback.

It won’t always be as simple as that of course, as perhaps your colleague won’t understand and if that is the case, the blame most likely lies with how you have presented the material. It is important to bear in mind that this colleague can only read your paper for the first time once. It is therefore very important that when a first-time reader is confused by what you are presenting, you fix it before showing it to others. If in the end your paper is easy to read and understand, then this will be beneficial when your paper is reviewed for publication.

Key points:

• Never make the reader feel stupid.
• The reader/reviewer’s misunderstanding is your fault.
• Examples early and often.
• Could you explain it to someone while walking in the woods, with no whiteboard or visual aids?
• Be aware of how first-time readers react to your paper/presentation and improve accordingly.