R.W. Hamming
October 1993
Little has been written on managing your own research (and very little on avoiding other people managing your research); However, your research is much more under your control than you may realize.We are concerned with great research here. Work that will get wide recognition, perhaps even win a Nobel Prize. As most people realize, the average paper is read by the author, the referee, and perhaps one other person. Classic papers are read by thousands. We are concerned with research that will matter in the long run and become more than a footnote in history.
If you are to do important work then you must work on the right problem at the right time in the right way. Without any one of the three, you may do good work but you will almost certainly miss real greatness.
Greatness is a matter of style. For example, after learning the elements of painting, you study under a master. While studying you pay attention what the master says in discussing your work, but you know if you are to achieve greatness then you must find your own style. Furthermore, a successful style in one age is not necessarily appropriate for another age. Cubism would not have gone over big during the realism period.
Similarly, there is no simple formula for doing great science or engineering, I can only talk around the topic. The topic is important because, so far as we have any solid evidence, you have but one life to live. Under these circumstances it seems better to live a life in which you do important things (important in your eyes, of course) than to merely live out your life. No sense in frittering away your life on things that will not even appear in the footnotes.