Richard Hamming Quotes

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

I've never been a stat guy.

Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go and informed by fairly good judgment.

Skill is a function of chance. It’s an intuitive best-use of chance situations.

[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

At a purely formal level, one could call probability theory the study of measure spaces with total measure one, but that would be like calling number theory the study of strings of digits which terminate.

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

I am fully assured, that no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognize, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.

The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you’re bent over about the color, don’t leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want.

Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4.

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

I have a theory of statistics: if you can double them or halve them and they still work, they are really good statistics.