Our Most Important Problem

In 1986, widely honored scientist and intellectual innovator Richard Hamming gave a talk at the Bell Labs Morris Research and Engineering Center in Morristown, N.J. where he recalled a series of lunches at one of the labs. During those lunches he began asking, “‘What are the important problems of your field?’ And after a week or so, ‘What important problems are you working on?’ And after some more time (he) came in one day and said, ‘If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?’” (Hamming, 1986).