Passages

Richard W. Hamming's The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn is one of the true essentials, a book to be read by every scientist or engineer (and certainly software engineer) interested in the big picture; it may be safely skipped by those who aim only at a life and career where one has "merely survived and amused" oneself, as Hamming himself puts it in his final, summative, chapter. The essence of this book is a combination of anecdote and aphorism drawn from a mature, active mind, reflecting on a great career spent at great places (Los Alamos, and then Bell Labs in its heyday, to be precise). There is also a great deal of mathematics, but the aphorism, backed by well-chosen anecdote(s), is fundamental; you do not need to know or care much about differential equations (and there are many here) to benefit from this book. It is hard to convey the value of the anecdotes, in a short review. The aphorisms, however, can be more than mentioned; what follows is, in reverse order, the entire set of Hamming's bolded, inset, aphorisms, by chapter (combining multiple chapters on the same topic, e.g., simulation). I have truncated one long item, which offers up a description of pure mathematics; you will have to read the book to get that one. The focus on aphorism is appropriate; I think Hamming himself would have agreed that this entire wonderful book is a kind of elaboration and proof of Pasteur's "Luck favors the prepared mind", which Hamming quotes not once, not twice, but seven times.