Review: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming

Overall Review: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a dense and technical book that outlines an actionable philosophy for having an impactful career. The book is dry yet filled with anecdotes from Richard Hamming’s life. I’d only recommend it to those who enjoy reading academic books. That said, if you’re interested in how to be a more effective scientist (or technologist or engineer) and find detail-filled stories of engineering discoveries interesting, then this textbook is for you.

Synopsis: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a lecture series from one of Richard Hamming’s courses given at the Naval Postgraduate School in the 90s. Using stories from his illustrious career, Hamming demonstrates the frameworks he used to develop a number of technologies (most notably Hamming Codes, for which he’s famous). He also shares advice on how you can apply those same principles in your own career and gives his predictions on the future of technology.

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Before reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, I didn’t realize how expansive Richard Hamming’s career was. Most surprising to me was that he got his start with the Manhattan Project modeling the explosion of the atomic bomb. Learning that helped me truly understand how important the major government programs (often military ones like the Manhattan Project) were in shaping early computation in Silicon Valley. I now understand why influential figures in the Silicon Valley tech scene are so interested in books like this one. The mid-century era of government research in computing feels like a lost era! It gave us a lot of early algorithms, the internet, and provided the intellectual capital for many of the influential early tech companies like Bell Labs and Intel. Now it seems to be barely discussed — at least I’d never learned much about the corporate history underpinning early Silicon Valley tech companies until now.

The first thing that struck me was how technical the writing was. While the writing is conversational, Richard Hamming is clearly a scientist at heart and uses a lot of higher-level math to communicate his points. Chapters 14-17 are basically all about Fourier transformations, and the text makes ample use of complicated integrals. Many times in the book I felt dumb! Chapter 9 on n-dimensional space and Chapters 14-17 on digital filters are definitely where the book most feels like a math textbook rather than a recreational read, but you do have to remember that these are lessons he gave to graduate students at the Naval Academy. Ultimately, the book contains a lot of useful ideas, but I found the math sometimes got in the way of these ideas.

Many parts of the book are useful even to those not in engineering, though. Frankly, much of what Hamming talks about in his book doesn’t really apply to me since it’s focused on research. However, many of the stories in the book motivate his general philosophy on learning, which I argue is useful to everyone. There’s a great quote in Chapter 2: “You must assume the responsibility for what you believe”. I love this quote — it sounds so obvious on the surface, but in reality it’s very common to believe something simply because an authority touted it. I’m certainly guilty of doing so! It takes a truly great mind to stand by their beliefs and, more importantly, consistently fact-check them with the commitment to change their mind when they’re wrong.

Another part of the book that’s particularly good is Chapter 22 on computer-aided instruction. It delves into what our education system should be prioritizing and, by extension, what you should be prioritizing as a lifelong learner. One point I thought was really interesting is that the ability to learn quickly is an important skill to cultivate. Hamming argues that college courses should, to some extent, rush you along because the point is to force you to learn quickly. While it’s bad to rush material so quickly that students don’t absorb anything, you also want to train students to pick up knowledge quickly. Hamming argues that you wouldn’t want to have a slow learner as a boss, and I think he’s right! He also makes the point that you want to make your lessons hard, not to torture the students, but to force them to learn. If a lecture is too easy, then students won’t be exerting themselves and won’t be building the muscles they need to be good lifelong learners. While he doesn’t excuse poor lecturers, he does point out that often great scientists aren’t always the best lecturers, but students still learn a lot as they’re forced to distill the scientist’s ideas in their own words. It’s a somewhat controversial opinion, but one that I was convinced by reading the book. It speaks to a tension where society’s goal is to make things easy, but at the same time, struggling through adversity is the only way to build up skills and muscles. You don’t build muscle by lifting light weights, and likewise, while as a society we should strive to make life easier, we still need to keep certain things difficult as training exercises. I certainly wouldn’t want to have a boss who wasn’t able to put in the work and change their mind when challenging data was presented.

I enjoyed reading the stories from Hamming’s career. In particular, I enjoyed his descriptions of the process of coming up with his ideas, like Hamming Codes (the compression innovation he’s most famous for). It’s not just factual, though — Hamming also fills the book with levity. The writing is clear and does a good job of capturing his witty humor—I could imagine him giving this series to a room full of post-docs and having fun with it. The whole book feels like a casual conversation with a really smart friend.

As an aside, I love that my employer Stripe puts out intellectual books like this for no other reason than to make the world a more knowledgeable place. It’s in line with John and Patrick’s¹ mentality of curiosity and lifelong learning. That culture of learning is something I continue to be impressed by at Stripe. While the Stripe Press books tend to be dense, I’ve found that I come away each time a more well-rounded and knowledgeable person.

While I enjoyed The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, overall I wouldn’t recommend this book. Richard Hamming’s insights are actionable but gated behind dense terminology. If you like textbooks and feel confident with complex math, I think you’ll enjoy this book. If not, I’d recommend instead reading a more accessible productivity book — I really liked The First 90 Days and Four Thousand Weeks, although they’re both less technical.