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Hamming, Intro to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (March 28, 1995)

securitylectures · 170.9K views · 2012-08-26 · 47:20

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Overview

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

On Hacker News

HN regularly recommends Hamming's lecture series as a fascinating, wisdom-rich course on how to approach hard technical problems and a career, often preferred to the book.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2016–2020

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What people said

yesenadam · 2019-02 · Strong recommendation

Sapolsky - Biology of Human Behavior 25 lectures [LINK] It's accessible to laymen, no prior knowledge needed. It covers so many different fields and levels of knowledge ("buckets" Sapolsky calls them), different ways of explaining human behaviour. By the signals in their brain, or the hormones in their blood, or what happened that day, or their childhood, or their genes, or evolution of humans etc. Also looks at other animals. A lot of touching/funny/inspiring/poignant stories about scientists in the field(s). Sapolsky is an amazing lecturer/raconteur. Hamming - Learning to Learn 32 lectures [VIDEO] The famous "You and your research" is one lecture in this, but every one of them is fascinating. History of computers, AI, codes, n-space, digital filters etc etc. Mainly it's great seeing how his mind works, his thinking style. (I've since read a few of his books, and I love how they're soaked with practical experience, in the same way these talks are. It's all stuff he's lived .)

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charlysl · 2018-09 · Strong recommendation

If your are interested in learning hard subjects, I highly recommend Richard Hamming's wonderful course The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn [1], and the related book [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

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hydandata · 2016-02 · Strong recommendation

I love programming, but never got the hang of Mathematics due to various reasons. Failed a big project as a solo programmer long time ago, when I was 17, because I could not create the necessary mathematical model and no help was available, with everything else completed, infrastructure, web site/interface database etc. Soon afterwards set off on a different career path, but always kept an intimate relationship with programming, doing some both at work and for fun at home. Recently, after watching R.W. Hamming lectures and reading his book "Art of Doing Science and Engineering" [1] [2] decided that I would try learning mathematics again. I found it really hard to do. There are so many implicit assumptions, so much ground that is not covered. I was about to give up again, when I found a book [3] by retired computer science professor, who seemed to have written it specifically for me! it really felt that way. Now I recommend it to almost everyone, especially tech-savvy people. I am no longer afraid of mathematics, with the help of this book, and great advice by Hamming, I am finally "getting it". If you find learning new programming languages easy, but struggle with mathematics, check it out! The book is not aimed at teaching you mathematics, rather, it teaches you those missing pieces, that almost every other book either assumes you already know, or describes vaguely and badly, gives you context and valuable advice. To me it almost feels like it is teaching you a functional pr

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Sources

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