The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

Hamming's final lectures at the Naval Postgraduate School, delivered over many years and published here in the Stripe Press edition that brought the book to a new generation. These are not technical lectures but a master class in thinking about thinking — how to choose problems worth working on, how to recognise when you are avoiding the important work, how to position yourself for luck, and why most capable people fail to do first-rate work. The chapter "You and Your Research" is one of the best essays on intellectual ambition ever written and has been passed from hand to hand in research labs and engineering teams for decades. Hamming's core question — "What are the important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on them?" — is as uncomfortable for a product director as it is for a scientist. The book is simultaneously practical and philosophical, and it rewards rereading at different stages of a career because the same passages acquire different meanings as your context changes.