You and Your Research — Richard Hamming
Transcript: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Richard Hamming gets to the heart on what differentiates a prolific scientist from an ordinary one.
“If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. ”
Another key idea is that of an attack. These problems are hard because they are not amenable to brute force. You need to find a trick to make the problem approachable.
By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn’t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important.
Although watching this may induce an existential crisis in grad students, understanding the ideas presented here is the key to making a difference with the work you pursue.