Danny Hillis Quotes

The notion of getting under the hood and explaining how something works, that's fairly familiar territory to me.

If something doesn't work in my house - TV, phone, stereo, anything - I just call my dad, and he knows the answer.

If you are unable to understand the cause of a problem it is impossible to solve it.

Our managers need to have a strong integration of managerial skills and technical understanding. One cannot substitute for the other.

Leaders fix things that are broken.

The system is broken, and we can fix it. It's not hard. We just have to do the work.

The solution of one problem always brings a few more problems to the surface to be solved, which were hidden underneath the theory of transmission.

I asked for more information because I am unable to unscrew the inscrutable.

Technical people tend to be more 'techie,' and management people are more 'managerial.'

For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft's dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out.

Problems are cured by facing their cause.

Everyone has technical issues - you have them until you die - but you have to be aware of them in a certain way.

I love to know why things work.

Let's Wrestle would rather poke fun than point fingers, even if there's a problem that needs fixing.

I learned to not be afraid to fix things that break.

I know firsthand that the characteristics of a great engineer - problem-solving skills, a deep understanding of technology, and a results-driven mindset - are the exact same things that any executive, in any industry, must have in order to succeed.

As an engineer, you learn there is a solution to every problem. It may take you a while, but eventually you're going to find it.

Generally, you cannot solve a problem without defining the problem completely.

I'm starting to feel like I can actually figure out how stuff works. I can actually pick stuff apart and have a chance of fixing it.

I'm an engineer.

The funny thing was, with IT, I was never really a tech type of person: I was better with people, good at dealing with people. I had technical experience; I knew the nitty gritty. I could never be a programmer or anything, but I knew my way around.

We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.

We need a lot more technically literate people. The computers are the tools that are going to solve essentially all problems, and the people who can use them better will be more effective.

If you go deep into a problem, you'll find most all of the time that there are yet more problems to be solved from the ground up.

On 'MythBusters,' a lot of what we do does not fall into any category of things we have ever done before. There's a lot of problem solving to figure out how to even approach a given problem. A background in science or engineering helps a lot.