Richard Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in Section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming numbers, sphere-packing (or hamming bound) and the Hamming distance.Hamming received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1937, a master's degree from the University of Nebraska in 1939, and finally a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942. He was a professor at the University of Louisville during World War II, 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, from 1946 to 1976, he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he collaborated with Claude Shannon. During this period, he was an Adjunct Professor at the City College of New York, School of Engineering. On July 23, 1976 he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he worked as an Adjunct Professor until 1997, when he became Professor Emeritus. He died a year later in 1998.He was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. His philosophy on scientific computing appears as preface to his 1962 book on numerical methods: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.Awards:Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery, 1968.Fellow of the IEEE, 1968.IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, 1979.Member of the National Academy of Engineering, 1980.Harold Pender Award, University of Pennsylvania, 1981.IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, 1988.Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, 1994.Basic Research Award, Eduard Rhein Foundation, 1996.Certificate of Merit, Franklin Institute, 1996The IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, named after him, is an award given annually by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), for "exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology", and he was the first recipient of this medal.Hamming discusses the use and potential of computers in the 1965 film Logic By Machine.