I first heard of Hamming through his famous article You and Your Research. So when I found a book under his name available from the public libraries, I reserved it without much thinking.
“You and Your Research” is in fact the last entry in this collection of lecturers, intended on military technical researchers (i.e. engineers and scientists) about the enter into their careers.
It was written in 1997, so much of the content is of historical interest only. But Hamming has a wonderfully fluid and engaging style. A video series of the lectures are available on YouTube, but I suspect the lectures read better on the page than when read out.
For me some highlights from the book are:
- the examples of “back of envelope” calculations in the earlier chapters, which motivate them much better than later illustrations (e.g. Poundstone’s brainteasers approach);
- Hamming’s stories of witnessing cutting-edge inventions at first hand (he worked with Claude Shannon for a time and was responsible for getting many early computers to work); and
- his comments on increasing use of computers and artificial intelligence, which sounds very reasonable even after 20 odd years of rapid development.
I found the chapters on Error Detection Code very hard going and the chapters on Digital Filters impenetrable: but that is probably for good reason because these are areas of engineering I have absolutely zero background in.
But Hamming’s discussion of how complex engineering problems should be analysed with reference to higher-dimensional spaces is very exciting, and makes me want to find out more about them.