#1 posted on Sep 13 2013, 10:56
In his talk, Hamming sketched vividly a typical life of a successful scientist. What stroke me most are things I found in common with myself. At the very beginning, you would be envious and all you have could just be ambition and devotion to research. What really could help you are the people around you and all you could do is to learn after them from the scratch. Another point that I can't agree more is Hamming's opinion on luck. It has been proved again and again that sometimes you indeed need some luck, but what plays the most significant role is your persistence. You have to always get geared up for the incoming luck. Also, Hamming stressed the importance of courage, drive, optimistic mind, ambiguity, doing important problem, self selling , fixing up personalty defects and so forth. All that he had mentioned almost have covered all the possible problems in a life-long research career. It is very useful for any person who wants to devote his or her life to research.