Hans Peter Luhn

Hans Peter Luhn was a German-American researcher in computer science and library and information science who worked for IBM. Born in Barmen, Germany, on July 1, 1896, he trained in the printing trade in Switzerland, served as a communications officer in the German Army in World War I, and then worked in textiles, where he invented the thread-counting gauge known as the Lunometer. He joined IBM in 1941 as a senior research engineer and became manager of its information retrieval research division. He held more than 80 patents and used punched cards, and later software, to search and index text. He created one of the earliest practical hash functions, proposed Key Word in Context indexing and selective dissemination of information, and gave his name to the Luhn algorithm. He received the Award of Merit of the Association for Information Science and Technology in 1964 and died that year.