Richard Hamming

Richard Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 - January 7, 1998) was a mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions to science include the Hamming code, the Hamming window (described in section 5.8 of Digital Filters) and the Hamming distance.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois and died in Monterey, California. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1937, a master's degree in 1939, and finally a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942. He was a professor at the University of Louisville when World War II was going on, and left to work on the Manhattan project in 1945, programming one of the earliest electronic digital computers to calculate the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. The objective of the program was to discover whether or not the atmosphere would ignite if an atomic bomb were detonated. The result of the computation was that this would not occur and so the United States used the bomb, first in a test in New Mexico, and then twice against Japan.

Later he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He collaborated with Claude E. Shannon.

Amongst other honors, Hamming received the Association for Computing Machinery Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, in 1968.

Table of contents

1 Books
2 Quote
3 External Links and Sources

Books

Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers
Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
Digital Filters ISBN 048665088X
The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers
Computers and Society
Coding and Information Theory
Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics
Introduction To Applied Numerical Analysis

Quote

Machines should work. People should think.
--Richard Hamming

External Links and Sources

http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?Richard+Hamming - FOLDOC biography of Hamming.