Advice From a Famous Mathematician and Babe Ruth Could Help Unlock Your Potential These simple approaches to doing great work often go overlooked - but they could be just what you need to get it done.

The mathematician Richard Hamming said, "If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work."

In the math world, Hamming was known as a rebel. But unlike Jim Stark, with his trademark T-shirt and pompadour, Hamming's rebellious nature was focused squarely on tackling some seriously knotty questions in early computer engineering.

Hamming's career was sprawling. His first professional job outside of academia was on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory, where he worked on the computers used to make the first atomic bombs. But it was in his next role, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where his pioneering work in error-correcting codes and digital filter theory contributed to several significant breakthroughs in computer science and telecommunications.