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Richard Hamming

Also Known As Richard Wesley Hamming · Richard W. Hamming
Theory of Computation

Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications, including the Hamming code, the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, the sphere-packing or Hamming bound, Hamming graph concepts and the Hamming distance. In April 1945 he joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed solutions to equations from the project's physicists, then joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946, where he was involved in nearly all of the laboratory's most prominent achievements over the next fifteen years. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1968, its third recipient. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Birth Year
1915 1
Birth Date
1915-02-11 1
Death Year
1998 1
Death Date
1998-01-07 1
Nationality
American 1
Award
Harold Pender Award 2
Award
IEEE Fellow 2
Award
IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal 2
Award
Turing Award 2
Award
ACM Fellow 2
Award
prize 2
Award
IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award 2
FAQs

What problem led Richard Hamming to invent error-correcting codes?

A weekend calculation that failed on a single error in 1947.

A failed weekend run of calculations at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Before going home on a Friday in 1947, Hamming set the machines to perform a long series of calculations over the weekend, and on Monday morning found that an error early in the process had stopped the calculation. He reasoned that if a computer can tell when an error has occurred, there should be a way of telling where the error is so the computer can correct it itself. His landmark 1950 paper introduced the Hamming distance and gave rise to the family of error-correcting codes known as Hamming codes.
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Richard Hamming
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Lead section
    January 7, 1998
  • lead sentence, parenthetical birth date
    Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915
  • Lead section
    Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 - January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications.
  • lead sentence, nationality clause
    was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications
View the Source
2. Wikidata: Richard Hamming
Wikidata Q92619, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source
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