[tryonqc]

Reminds me of a talk by Hamming that went like:

"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?"

Full transcript @ http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

I feel like most people don't know what are the great problems in their field.