Why do so few sci­en­tists make sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions and so many are for­got­ten in the long run?

That was the ques­tion the noted math­e­mati­cian and com­puter sci­en­tist Richard Ham­ming (he of Ham­ming Codes fame) asked and tried to answer in a talk he gave at Bell Labs in 1986. How­ever his edu­ca­tional and inspir­ing talk, You and Your Research, went much deeper than that; offer­ing advice on how we can make sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to our own field, what­ever that may be.

Why shouldn’t you do sig­nif­i­cant things in this one life, how­ever you define sig­nif­i­cant? I’m not going to define it — you know what I mean. I will talk mainly about sci­ence because that is what I have stud­ied. But so far as I know, and I’ve been told by oth­ers, much of what I say applies to many fields. Out­stand­ing work is char­ac­ter­ized very much the same way in most fields, but I will con­fine myself to science.

[…] Our soci­ety frowns on peo­ple who set out to do really good work. You’re not sup­posed to; luck is sup­posed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do some­thing sig­nif­i­cant. You don’t have to tell other peo­ple, but shouldn’t you say to your­self, “Yes, I would like to do some­thing significant.”