Do important work | Swizec Teller

Lately I've been reading Richard Hamming's wonderful book, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. It's about style in engineering, art.

I was conned into doing on a digital computer, in the absolute binary days, a problem which the best analog computers couldn't do. And I was getting an answer.

When I thought carefully and said to myself: "You know, Hamming, you're going to have to file a report on this military job; after you spend a lot of money you're going to have to account for it and every analog installation is going to want the report to see if they can't find flaws in it."

I was doing the required integration by a rather crummy method, to say the least, but I was getting the answer. And I realized that in truth the problem was not just to get the answer; it was to demonstrate for the first time, and beyond question, that I could beat the analog computer on its own ground with a digital machine.

I reworked the method of solution, created a theory which was nice and elegant, and changed the way we computed the answer; the results were no different.

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