“How do I obey Newtons rule? He said, ‘If I have seen further than
others, it is because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.’ These days
we stand on each other’s feet!

“Now if you are much of a mathematician you know that the effort to
generalize often means that the solution is simple.
“I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing
differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final
productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people
can indeed build on what you’ve done, or you can do it in such a
fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what
you’ve done.”

— Hamming

Richard W. Hamming, 1915–1998
• Los Alamos, 1945.
• Bell Labs, 1946–1976.
• Naval Postgraduate School, 1976–1998.
• Turing Award, 1968. (Third time given.)
• IEEE Hamming Medal, 1987.