person Professor Richard Wesley Hamming (1915-02-11 -
1998-01-07). An American mathematician known for his work in
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.
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
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
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.").
Electrical and Electronics Engineers awarded Hamming the
Emanuel R Piore Award in 1979 and a medal in 1988.
[Richard Hamming. Coding and Information Theory.
Prentice-Hall, 1980. ISBN 0-13-139139-9].
(2003-06-07)