Hamming on Hamming: Learning to Learn
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2024
44:24 · 9.4K views · Mar 4, 2018
The final lecture of Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn course, from 1995, based on his well-known talk 'You and Your Research'. It covers how to do important work and build a career.
HN people recommend it as the capstone of Hamming's course and as career advice about working on important problems.
4 comments from Hacker News
This reads a lot like Hamming's talk You and Your Research applied to programming. It's the last lecture in a wonderful 31-lecture course, about maths, computers, physics, technology, illustrated through Hamming's life. He'd spend his lunch hours chatting with people at Bell Labs, asking them if they were working on the most important problems in their field, and if not, why not?! this video
I prefer Richard Hamming’s series: this video “ I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and Your Career." But I left the word "Research" in the title because that is what I have most studied. ”
It is a great book, and it includes an amazing essay by him titled You and Your Research [0][1] - which explains why it is important to "always be learning". 0 - [LINK] 1 - this video (lecture version)
“If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?” — Richard Hamming this video