Charles Leonard Hamblin

Charles Leonard Hamblin (1922 – 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales) in Sydney.

Among his most well-known achievements in the area of computer science was the introduction of Reverse Polish Notation and the use in 1957 of a push-down pop-up stack. This preceded the work of Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson on use of a push-pop stack. The stack had been invented by Alan Turing in 1946 when he introduced such a stack in his design of the ACE computer. Hamblin's most well-known contribution to philosophy is his book Fallacies, a standard work in the area of the false conclusions in logic.

Interrupted by the Second World War and radar service in the Australian Air Force, Hamblin's studies included mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and he obtained a doctorate in 1957 at the London School of Economics. From 1955, he was lecturer at N.S.W. University of Technology, and later professor of philosophy at the same place, until his death in 1985, during which time the organization had been renamed The University of New South Wales.

In the second half of the 1950s, Hamblin worked with the third computer available in Australia, a DEUCE computer manufactured by the English Electric Company. For the DEUCE, he designed one of the first programming languages, later called GEORGE, which was based on Reverse Polish Notation. His associated compiler (language translator) translated the programs formulated in GEORGE into the machine language of the computer, in 1957.

Hamblin's work is considered to be the first to use Reverse Polish Notation, and this is why he is called an inventor of this representation method. Regardless of whether Hamblin independently invented the notation and its usage, he showed the merit, service, and advantage of the Reverse Polish way of writing programs for the processing on programmable computers and algorithms to make it happen.

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