Actually I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine, because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent his life happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me knew that I could also say that I was not so much ‘angry’ as ‘jealous’, that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy.

there were a group of scientists from the University of Geneva who conducted a brilliant study. It was one of those studies that I was just so envious that I didn’t do the study and I didn’t come up with the idea.

I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

I think I’ve always been jealous of musicians. You hear the story where Bob Dylan wrote a song in the afternoon and it became the anthem for a generation.

Yeah, there’s a number one. I can’t stop talking about it. I’ve read it three times now. I will read it again soon, is Titan , the Ron Chernow book about