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 if the detonation of an
atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere. 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.
Awards
Amongst other honors, Hamming received the Association for Computing Machinery Turing Award, the most prestigious award in
computer science, in 1968.
The
Richard W. Hamming Medal is an award given annually by IEEE for 'exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology'.
See Also
\n*IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
Books
\n*Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers\n*Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn \n*Digital Filters ISBN 048665088X\n*The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers\n*Computers and Society\n*Coding and Information Theory\n*Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics\n*Introduction To Applied Numerical Analysis
Quote
\nMachines should work. People should think.\n\n--Richard Hamming
External Links and Sources
Hamming, Richard\nHamming, Richard
