Richard Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming
Richard W Hamming photo
Born	February 11, 1915(1915-02-11) Chicago, Illinois
Died	January 7, 1998 (aged 82) Monterey, California
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Louisville Manhattan Project Bell Telephone Laboratories Naval Postgraduate School
Alma mater	University of Chicago University of Nebraska University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Doctoral advisor	Waldemar Trjitzinsky
Known for	Hamming code Hamming window Hamming numbers Sphere-packing Hamming distance Association for Computing Machinery
Influenced	David J. Farber
Notable awards	Turing Award (1968)

Richard Wesley Hamming (Chicago, February 11, 1915 – Monterey, California, 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.

He 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 E. 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 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 and professional recognition

• 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 ACM, 1994.
• Eduard Rhein Award, 1996.

The Richard W. Hamming Medal is an award given annually by IEEE for 'exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology'.

See also

• IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

Books

• Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, McGraw-Hill, 1962; second edition 1973. Dover paperback reprint 1985.
• Calculus and the Computer Revolution, Houghton-Mifflin, 1968.
• Introduction To Applied Numerical Analysis, McGraw-Hill, 1971.
• Computers and Society, McGraw-Hill, 1972.
• Digital Filters, Prentice Hall, 1977; second edition 1983; third edition 1989. ISBN 0-486-65088-X Dover paperback reprint, ca. 2001.
• Coding and Information Theory, Prentice Hall 1980; second edition 1986.
• Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics, Prentice Hall, 1985. Dover paperback reprint, ca. 2005. Unconventional introductory textbook which attempts to both teach calculus and give some idea of what it is good for at the same time. Might be of special interest to someone teaching an introductory calculus course using a conventional textbook, in order to pick up some new pedagogical viewpoints.
• The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers, Addison-Wesley, 1991.
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Gordon and Breach, 1997.

  Entertaining and instructive. Hamming tries to extract general lessons -- both personal and technical – to aid one in having a successful technical career by telling stories from his own experiences.

  (Some of this material relating to the self-management of one's technical career can be found online in You and Your Research, (Hamming 1986).)

  One of Hamming's lessons is never trust without question someone who claims to be giving you highly accurate data to analyze – not because they're deliberately lying to you but because the data is never as accurate as people think.

Appearances

• Hamming discusses the use and potential of computers in the 1965 film Logic By Machine.

References

• Hamming, Richard (1965), Logic By Machine, http://www.archive.org/details/logic_by_machine_1 
• Hamming, Richard (1980), "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics", The American Mathematical Monthly 87: 81, doi:10.2307/2321982, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.html 
• Hamming, Richard (1986), You and Your Research, http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html 

External links and references

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Hamming

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Richard Hamming", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hamming.html .
• "Richard Hamming." FOLDOC
• New York Times obituary

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