Important Questions

Richard Hamming, as related by Paul Graham, asked:

1. "What are the important problems of your field?''
2. "What important problems are you working on?''
3. "Why aren't you working on the important problems?"

Hamming dedicated the afternoon after lunch on Friday to thinking about the big hairy important problems in the field and how he might attack them: "Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important."

PS. Back in Oakland to 1/15, in Austin til the end of Feb.