Richard Hamming's 1986 Bellcore talk: work on important problems or stay ordinary
thisguyknowsai · x · 2026-10-01
Richard Hamming spent 30 years at Bell Labs (joined 1946), shared an office with Claude Shannon, invented error-correcting codes, and won the Turing Award in 1968. But his lasting fame came from a March 7, 1986 talk at Bellcore before 200 researchers: "You and Your Research."
The core habit: every Friday afternoon he blocked "Great Thoughts Time" — no experiments, meetings, or papers. He asked which problems in his field were important, where the field was going, and whether he was working on any of them.
He took the question to lunch, asking chemists what the important problems were, then delivering the friendship-ending follow-up: if your work isn't important, why are you at Bell Labs doing it? After that, he wasn't welcome at the table.
The whole talk in one line: "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work." It's arithmetic, not motivation — the problem you choose caps your result. The transcript has been free online for 40 years; Stripe Press republished the lecture series as The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.
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