Richard Hamming

Richard Hamming
Hamming, Richard

   <person> Professor Richard Wesley Hamming (1915-02-11 -
   1998-01-07).  An American mathematician known for his work in
   {information theory} (notably {error detection and
   correction}), having invented the concepts of {Hamming code},
   {Hamming distance}, and {Hamming window}.

   Richard Hamming received his B.S. from the University of
   Chicago in 1937, his M.A. from the University of Nebraska in
   1939, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of
   Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942.  In 1945 Hamming joined
   the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

   In 1946, after World War II, Hamming joined the {Bell
   Telephone Laboratories} where he worked with both {Shannon}
   and {John Tukey}.  He worked there until 1976 when he accepted
   a chair of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School
   at Monterey, California.

   Hamming's fundamental paper on error-detecting and
   error-correcting codes ("{Hamming codes}") appeared in 1950.

   His work on the {IBM 650} leading to the development in 1956
   of the {L2} programming language.  This never displaced the
   workhorse language {L1} devised by Michael V Wolontis.  By
   1958 the 650 had been elbowed aside by the 704.

   Although best known for error-correcting codes, Hamming was
   primarily a numerical analyst, working on integrating
   {differential equations} and the {Hamming spectral window}
   used for smoothing data before {Fourier analysis}.  He wrote
   textbooks, propounded aphorisms ("the purpose of computing is
   insight, not numbers"), and was a founder of the {ACM} and a
   proponent of {open-shop} computing ("better to solve the right
   problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.").

   In 1968 he was made a fellow of the {Institute of Electrical
   and Electronics Engineers} and awarded the {Turing Prize} from
   the {Association for Computing Machinery}.  The Institute of
   Electrical and Electronics Engineers awarded Hamming the
   Emanuel R Piore Award in 1979 and a medal in 1988.

   
(http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hamming.html).

   (http://zapata.seas.smu.edu/~gorsak/hamming.html).

   (http://webtechniques.com/archives/1998/03/homepage/).

   [Richard Hamming.  Coding and Information Theory.
   Prentice-Hall, 1980.  ISBN 0-13-139139-9].

   (2003-06-07)