I honestly don’t understand the raving reviews of The Art of Doing Science and Engineering on Amazon.com. As of 4 January 2026, 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 1,221 reviews. True, Richard Hamming was one of the great minds of his era. Think of Claude Shannon or John Tukey to name only a few. But reading the book I kept wondering what Hamming really wanted to convey. Ok, some of the anecdotes from his earlier work at Los Alamos or at the Bell Telephone Laboratories are informative (and sometimes even a bit entertaining), but they all hail from literally decades ago, and in recounting them Hamming manifestly sounds like an old-timer way past his prime. What is more, he repeatedly comes across slightly condescending to the effect of ‘Listen to me because you will need this. I have seen it all when you weren’t even born.’ Apparently, this attitude is not reserved for the readers (or attendees of the his course at the Naval Postgraduate School on which the book as based). This quotation from the book is a good example where he talked about colleagues in an atmospheric chemistry project: ‘My main idea, besides the ease and accuracy, was to keep their minds focused on what they were best able to do – chemistry – and not have them fussing with the machine with which they were not experts.’ He, the mathematician, wants to keep the minds of the chemists in a chemistry research project focused.
In sum, I can see neither the art in Hamming’s way of doing science and engineering nor how the book could help in learning to learn. Still, some aspects are definitely informative, and sometimes I even fully subscribe to his insights, e. g. when Hamming states:
If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.
I give it 3 stars.