I read Hamming's "You and Your Research" some years back, and recall that it was quite appropriate. See http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dahlin/bookshelf/hamming.html for the text. It's the penultimate lecture in the video series.
It's a pretty good course on how to be not merely technically skilled, but effective. For example, how technological progress usually works and the importance of back of the envelope calculations. He teaches with a lot of personal narratives which are easier to relate to and remember.
The book is easier to read than watching the videos, though you could rip the audio and it would be an okay audio book.
I watched through the series a couple of months ago. I will do my best to provide a couple of the highlights that I really liked. Unfortunately, I didn't keep a detailed journal of the course as a I watched. I really should have.
General Concept:
Richard Hamming is a Turing Award winning Computer Scientist and Mathematician. He spent a long and illustrious career at Bell Labs. As with many other promising scientists of the day, Hamming took part in the Nuclear Bomb effort and worked in Los Alamos. He refers to himself throughout the series as little more than a scientific janitor at Los Alamos. However, he realized during his time at Los Alamos that he had the rare opportunity to observe and interact with some of the most famous and brilliant scientists in the world. He decided that he wanted to join their ranks. However, after the war, he found that his effort was blocked by the fact that he didn't really know how to become great. There was no instruction course in become a great scientist. Thus, he set out to find the principles for himself. This series is his summary of the decades of investigation and personal experience in becoming a great scientist.
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Principles:
The following are a list of things that stood out in the series. Hamming had a number of principles that he constantly harped on. I will try to do my best to note some of them here and explain the context:
"Luck favors the prepared mind"
The longer you stay with a problem the higher the likelihood that you are going to find a creative moment somewhere in the mix. This idea reverberates throughout the entire series. In some sense, Hamming is trying to break apart the luck part from the preparation part of the equation throughout all of his talks. Interestingly enough, he declares that he doesn't believe that there is a formula for creativity (or at least a formula that any of us can use or know about). Instead, he harps on persistence as a part of this equation. You have to go after a problem for a long period of time. Once you have spent long enough with the problem that it has mades its way into your dreams, you know that you are approaching the point were rare epiphany moments are possible.
"With that which you learn from other you will follow, with that which you learned for yourself you will lead"
This is another quote that you hear time and time again throughout the series. By this he means that you actively have to work through practice problems and concepts yourself. He has found a vast difference in his understanding of topics that he passively soaked up and those subjects that he active dug into and made sure that he understood. In some sense, he used the Feynman technique. He pushed himself to being able to understand the concepts well enough that he could explain it fully and confidently to others.
"Find the people who are doing important things and help them do those important things."
The series is full of examples of thus. Hamming made it a habit to go after interesting problems with other people at Bell labs. He sought out opportunities to contribute to other people's work. It was clear the Claude Shannon was a genius, so Hamming made every effort to help Shannon out by providing computing assistance for Shannon's projects.
One of the fascinating habits that Hamming had was to grab lunch with different departments at Bell Labs. He would make friends but lose them quickly as well. He was constantly pursuing people with the question: "What are the big problems in your space?" He would then follow up with: "Well, why aren't you working on them?" This made people uncomfortable. However, Hamming made the decision that he was going to do 'grade-A' work, as he refers to it. Hence, he knew that he needed to associate with people who were doing grade-A work. If they weren't then those people were useless to him. He laments that fact that many brilliant people at Bell Labs went down as making no significant contribution even...
Thanks for your introduction! Are the videos essential in that there are many diagrams and visualisations shown or can you get most or all of the meaning by listening to the audio portion and reading through the chapters of the book?
Listening to the audio will certainly do the trick. He runs through a lot of the big picture explanations of the problems that he was working on with the whiteboard but those aren't primary. By his own telling, all of the problem details are really just to frame the principles that he is communicating.
That being said, I watched with the video. I didn't try to only listen to the audio. So, it might be harder to follow without the visual aspect. And, he randomly pops in the principles. I can't really say that the highlights were only at the beginning or ending of lectures.
I think that genius takes extraordinary intellect but also a penchant for timing. Solve interesting problems, but also at the right time.
A way to overcome this is the Erdos approach: have a backlog of problems in your mind and allowed them to be solved naturally as you learn and new discoveries are made. Maybe that is why he was such a prolific mathematician.
Was just this. In school you can listen, and be taught. But learning how to learn is an entirely different skill. Foundational knowledge is really important, but eventually you need to know how to pick up things on your own.
Understanding the learning process, and the process of seeking out relevant information is almost more important than being able to memorize text and lectures. If you can only be taught, that you rely on schooling. If you can learn, than your limits are only based on time :)
In case anyone is interested in a tl;dr, PLOS Computational Biology just published a "Ten Rules" article on Hamming's talk: "Ten Simple Rules for Lifelong Learning, According to Hamming"
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 40.4 ms ] threadThe book on the topic is at http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn... .
I read Hamming's "You and Your Research" some years back, and recall that it was quite appropriate. See http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dahlin/bookshelf/hamming.html for the text. It's the penultimate lecture in the video series.
The book is easier to read than watching the videos, though you could rip the audio and it would be an okay audio book.
General Concept:
Richard Hamming is a Turing Award winning Computer Scientist and Mathematician. He spent a long and illustrious career at Bell Labs. As with many other promising scientists of the day, Hamming took part in the Nuclear Bomb effort and worked in Los Alamos. He refers to himself throughout the series as little more than a scientific janitor at Los Alamos. However, he realized during his time at Los Alamos that he had the rare opportunity to observe and interact with some of the most famous and brilliant scientists in the world. He decided that he wanted to join their ranks. However, after the war, he found that his effort was blocked by the fact that he didn't really know how to become great. There was no instruction course in become a great scientist. Thus, he set out to find the principles for himself. This series is his summary of the decades of investigation and personal experience in becoming a great scientist.
--------
Principles:
The following are a list of things that stood out in the series. Hamming had a number of principles that he constantly harped on. I will try to do my best to note some of them here and explain the context:
"Luck favors the prepared mind"
The longer you stay with a problem the higher the likelihood that you are going to find a creative moment somewhere in the mix. This idea reverberates throughout the entire series. In some sense, Hamming is trying to break apart the luck part from the preparation part of the equation throughout all of his talks. Interestingly enough, he declares that he doesn't believe that there is a formula for creativity (or at least a formula that any of us can use or know about). Instead, he harps on persistence as a part of this equation. You have to go after a problem for a long period of time. Once you have spent long enough with the problem that it has mades its way into your dreams, you know that you are approaching the point were rare epiphany moments are possible.
"With that which you learn from other you will follow, with that which you learned for yourself you will lead"
This is another quote that you hear time and time again throughout the series. By this he means that you actively have to work through practice problems and concepts yourself. He has found a vast difference in his understanding of topics that he passively soaked up and those subjects that he active dug into and made sure that he understood. In some sense, he used the Feynman technique. He pushed himself to being able to understand the concepts well enough that he could explain it fully and confidently to others.
"Find the people who are doing important things and help them do those important things."
The series is full of examples of thus. Hamming made it a habit to go after interesting problems with other people at Bell labs. He sought out opportunities to contribute to other people's work. It was clear the Claude Shannon was a genius, so Hamming made every effort to help Shannon out by providing computing assistance for Shannon's projects.
One of the fascinating habits that Hamming had was to grab lunch with different departments at Bell Labs. He would make friends but lose them quickly as well. He was constantly pursuing people with the question: "What are the big problems in your space?" He would then follow up with: "Well, why aren't you working on them?" This made people uncomfortable. However, Hamming made the decision that he was going to do 'grade-A' work, as he refers to it. Hence, he knew that he needed to associate with people who were doing grade-A work. If they weren't then those people were useless to him. He laments that fact that many brilliant people at Bell Labs went down as making no significant contribution even...
That being said, I watched with the video. I didn't try to only listen to the audio. So, it might be harder to follow without the visual aspect. And, he randomly pops in the principles. I can't really say that the highlights were only at the beginning or ending of lectures.
A way to overcome this is the Erdos approach: have a backlog of problems in your mind and allowed them to be solved naturally as you learn and new discoveries are made. Maybe that is why he was such a prolific mathematician.
Was just this. In school you can listen, and be taught. But learning how to learn is an entirely different skill. Foundational knowledge is really important, but eventually you need to know how to pick up things on your own.
Understanding the learning process, and the process of seeking out relevant information is almost more important than being able to memorize text and lectures. If you can only be taught, that you rely on schooling. If you can learn, than your limits are only based on time :)
http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...