Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming
(1)Richard Hamming
(person)Richard Hamming received his B.S. from the University ofChicago in 1937, his M.A. from the University of Nebraska in1939, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942. In 1945 Hamming joinedthe Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
In 1946, after World War II, Hamming joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories where he worked with both Shannonand John Tukey. He worked there until 1976 when he accepteda chair of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate Schoolat Monterey, California.
Hamming's fundamental paper on error-detecting anderror-correcting codes ("Hamming codes") appeared in 1950.
His work on the IBM 650 leading to the development in 1956of the L2 programming language. This never displaced theworkhorse language L1 devised by Michael V Wolontis. By1958 the 650 had been elbowed aside by the 704.
Although best known for error-correcting codes, Hamming wasprimarily a numerical analyst, working on integratingdifferential equations and the Hamming spectral windowused for smoothing data before Fourier analysis. He wrotetextbooks, propounded aphorisms ("the purpose of computing isinsight, not numbers"), and was a founder of the ACM and aproponent of open-shop computing ("better to solve the rightproblem 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 fromthe Association for Computing Machinery. The Institute ofElectrical and Electronics Engineers awarded Hamming theEmanuel 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].