I started eating with them [the chemists] for a while. And I started 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 I 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?’ I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!…In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, ‘Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven’t changed my research’, he says, ‘but I think it was well worthwhile.’ And I said, ‘Thank you, Dave’, and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles.

-- Richard Hamming - “You and Your Research”