Pre-Hamming Question

Are you interdisciplinary enough?

I bet many of you have heard about Hamming questions. Some of you have certainly pondered on them. And the questions are essential indeed: “What are the most important problems in your field?” and “Why aren't you working on them?”

I tried to pose the first one to myself and saw a hidden premise: there is a field to be considered yours. Sure, historically, Richard Hamming asked that from his fellow scientists who had chosen what to work on… or had they?

We live in a world defined to a great extent by what we think about it, and the division of sciences into fields and subfields is no exception. What if we did not consider all the options? What if our choice was limited at the time we made it? What if the recent developments turned an adjacent field of knowledge upside down, and we totally missed that?

Many great scientists were interested in more than one discipline. Not only scientific ones, too! Richard Feynman was a skilled percussionist and an amateur artist. Albert Einstein played the violin. Pythagoras and many other ancient Greeks stood at the intersection of mathematics, natural sciences, and art.

All these great people defined the fields of their labor by mixing and synthesizing from what was there. New scions of knowledge are born where the existing ones mate.

Here, I propose the pre-Hamming question: “What is my field of knowledge?” From now on, before you ask yourself the first of the Hamming questions, please step back for a while and try to clearly see your interdisciplinary self.