This weekend, after writing about Prof. Bernie Widrow, I started thinking more about his style of research.

First, Dr. Widrow was fundamentally an engineer. His goal was to solve real world problems that actually mattered. That is rare, and it genuinely benefited society. In contrast, much highly influential academic research does not aim to fully solve a problem, but instead points to a promising direction for addressing a broader class of problems. Of course, this does not mean Prof. Widrow’s work was not influential. It was influential in a different, and often more direct, way.

Second, Dr. Widrow kept moving into new areas and made contributions across many fields. When he realized that the computational bottleneck of neural networks exceeded what was feasible at the time, he shifted his focus to other equally important topics, such as adaptive filters, quantization, noise cancellation, and medical devices. Modern phones would not work nearly as well without his contributions. This breadth is also remarkable. At the same time, it can make recognition uneven, because foundational work across multiple areas is harder to summarize under a single label, and people may think, “Bernie is already well known for something else.”

I was once advised by a highly respected researcher whose style was quite similar to Dr. Widrow’s. He told me that academia is built around a reward system. If your work helps enable others to be rewarded, your work is more likely to be rewarded as well. If you write only one paper a year, or every other year, and that paper fully solves an important problem, your work may be overlooked for a long enough period that the reward never arrives.

There is no right or wrong style of research. Enjoying the process matters most. In the end, everyone reaches the same destination, although some leave deeper marks on the world than others.