The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

This was an inspiration read, it makes we want to brush up on my algebra and calculus. Despite not following all the mathematics, Hamming shares prophetic wisdom considering it was published in 1996. The book is a collections of essays where Hamming shares his experience as a scientist and researcher that guided his career at Bell Laboratories and work in computing creating error correction codes, among many other projects. Hamming offers advice on managing a career, focusing on doing high quality work solving problems that matter - and to anticipate you will have to constantly learn and reinvent yourself managing through compounding change and technical advancement in your career. I loved Hamming ideas on leadership, and to plan for ambiguity and change as inevitable in your field and career.

But be careful—the race is not to the one who works hardest! You need to work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way—what I have been calling “style.”

Original 2019 Review: Hamming invented a lot of cool stuff, but he is best known for sitting down and asking people why they weren't working on the most important problems in their domain. Presumably he didn't make a lot of friends with this strategy, but his is the name we remember, not theirs.

This book is excellent excellent excellent. The thesis is that a life lived without producing excellent work isn't one worth living. Hamming describes the book as a manual of style; while university is good at teaching technical skills, it's not very good at teaching the important stuff that falls /between/ the discrete subjects. Like how to choose important problems to work on, or where insight comes from, or how to stay ahead of the trend and not become obsolete.

To this extent, Hamming talks about his own successes and failures (though mostly his successes — he says it's more important to study success than failure, since you'd like to replicate only the former.) He's obviously proud of his accomplishments, which is a refreshing note from most technical autobiographies, in which the authors present a cool, modest description of their work. Hamming provides commentary behind each of his wins, describing the circumstances that lead to it, and how having a “prepared mind” helped him jump on it before others did. He further notes how he could have done better, and gives explicit advice to the reader for how to do a better job than he did.

This is a wonderfully insightful book, and is chocked full inspiration and interesting technical topics. If you're in a technical field and you'd like to do great work, this is mandatory reading.