Richard W. Hamming

Richard Hamming

Born	(1915-02-11)February 11, 1915 Chicago, Illinois
Died	January 7, 1998(1998-01-07) (aged 82) Monterey, California
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Louisville Manhattan Project (Los Alamos Laboratory, (1945)) Bell Telephone Laboratories (1946–1976) Naval Postgraduate School (1976–1998)
Alma mater	University of Chicago (B.S. 1937) University of Nebraska (M.A. 1939) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Ph.D. 1942)
Thesis	Some Problems in the Boundary Value Theory of Linear Differential Equations (1942)
Doctoral advisor	Waldemar Trjitzinsky
Known for	Hamming code Hamming window Hamming numbers Hamming distance Association for Computing Machinery
Influenced	David J. Farber
Notable awards	Turing Award (1968) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1979) Harold Pender Award (1981) IEEE Hamming Medal (1988)

Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing (or Hamming bound), and the Hamming distance.

Born in Chicago, Hamming attended University of Chicago, University of Nebraska and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in mathematics under the supervision of Waldemar Trjitzinsky (1901-1973). In April 1945 he joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. He left to join the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946. Over the next fifteen years he was involved in nearly all of the Laboratories' most prominent achievements.

After retiring from the Bell Labs in 1976, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he worked as an Adjunct Professor and senior lecturer in computer science, and devoted himself to teaching and writing books. He delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before he died from a heart attack on January 7, 1998.