Richard Hamming was not an artist. He was a mathematician, and a damned good one, too. After a yearlong stint in Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, Hamming moved to Bell Labs, where he performed groundbreaking computer research alongside scientists like Feynman, Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, Shannon and Bethe. His contributions to science are manifold: Hamming code, Hamming bound, Hamming window, Hamming numbers, and Hamming distance all bear his name.

Hamming was an earth-shaking force in mathematics, however, his magnum opus contained no equations at all — it was a speech: You and Your Research, delivered in 1986.

Hamming’s lecture sought to answer a single question: How do world-class creators produce world-class work?

Drawing on 40 years of professional experience (having worked with many Nobel Prize winners) and his extensive reading of scientific biographies, Hamming outlined the factors that separated great scientists from merely average ones, and summed up his findings in a spectacular 44-minute performance.

How do I get the opportunity to do great work? What is the importance of luck? How do I know if an idea is worth pursuing? When do I know it’s time to move on from a bad idea? Why do so many smart people fail to produce meaningful work? Who should I eat lunch with?

Beyond the usual aphorisms like start young or work hard, Hamming pulls back the curtains on the “Nobel Prize factory” at Bell Labs, and explains how scientific progress was actually made: no words are minced, no topic is overlooked, and a couple of Hamming’s less-apt colleagues are thrown under the bus. It’s a glorious lecture, and its lessons extend far beyond careers in science.

But by far the strangest suggestion that Hamming makes is about where we work:

“One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks… they did some of the best physics ever.”

Today, cash-flush companies (especially in the technology sector) are known for filling their offices with playful indulgences like ball pits, yoga studios, playground slides, ping pong tables and even helicopter meeting rooms. Sure, they enhance the playfulness of the workplace — but do they actually enhance worker creativity?

Hamming says no.

“This is just stupid” — Richard Hamming, probably.

In fact, Hamming argues, a more comfortable workplace might contribute to impaired creativity. Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, a luxurious, all-expenses-paid resort for Nobel Prize winners (like Einstein and Gödel) was responsible for less groundbreaking scientific papers than any dingy Swiss patent office ever was.

“The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.”

While Einstein’s move from Berlin to Princeton had been lauded for bringing “the pope of physics … to the United States, [which] will now become the center of the natural sciences”, Einstein failed to publish a single significant paper during his twenty-year tenure at the IAS.

His cozy New Jersey corner-office was to no avail.