Richard Hamming's final 1995 course, filmed at 80, is now fully free online
thisdudelikesAI · x · 2026-10-13
- Richard Hamming — Manhattan Project computer lead, inventor of Hamming codes, Turing Award winner — taught his final course at 80 in spring 1995 at the Naval Postgraduate School; all 32 lectures are now free online on YouTube, no login.
- The course's real subject is "style", not technical content: what separated great scientists from equally hardworking peers was never ability.
- Highlights: "You Get What You Measure" on metric traps; n-dimensional space lectures explaining why 3D intuition fails — decades before embeddings made it essential.
- The final lecture is his famous 1986 Bell Labs talk "You and Your Research": work on important problems; an open door costs 10% productivity and is worth it.
- The 1997 book (reissued by Stripe Press in 2020) came after; the lectures are the only place to watch him deliver it himself.
Related event: Hamming's 1995 farewell course: all 32 lectures now free online(2 posts)→
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