Richard Hamming

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).

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), Hamming graph concepts, and the Hamming distance.

Hamming was born in Chicago, Illinois, on February 11, 1915, the son of Richard J. Hamming, a credit manager, and Mabel G. Redfield.

He grew up in Chicago, where he attended Crane Technical High School and Crane Junior College.

Hamming initially wanted to study engineering, but money was scarce during the Great Depression, and the only scholarship offer he received came from the University of Chicago, which had no engineering school.

Instead, he became a science student, majoring in mathematics, and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1937.

He later considered this a fortunate turn of events.

"As an engineer," he said, "I would have been the guy going down manholes instead of having the excitement of frontier research work."

He went on to earn a Master of Arts degree from the University of Nebraska in 1939, and then entered the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Some Problems in the Boundary Value Theory of Linear Differential Equations under the supervision of Waldemar Trjitzinsky.

His thesis was an extension of Trjitzinsky's work in that area.

He looked at Green's function and further developed Jacob Tamarkin's methods for obtaining characteristic solutions.

While he was a graduate student, he discovered and read George Boole's The Laws of Thought.

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign awarded Hamming his Doctor of Philosophy in 1942, and he became an instructor in mathematics there.

He married Wanda Little, a fellow student, on September 5, 1942, immediately after she was awarded her own Master of Arts in English literature.

They would remain married until his death, and had no children.

In 1944, he became an assistant professor at the J.B. Speed Scientific School at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.

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.

With World War II still ongoing, Hamming left Louisville in April 1945 to work on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, in Hans Bethe's division, programming the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists.

His wife Wanda soon followed, taking a job at Los Alamos as a human computer, working for Bethe and Edward Teller.

Hamming later recalled that:"Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, 'It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere.' I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, 'The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels.' He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, 'What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?' I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me.

I told him.

His reply was, 'Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you.'"

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.

Hamming remained at Los Alamos until 1946, when he accepted a post at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL).

For the trip to New Jersey, he bought Klaus Fuchs's old car.

When he later sold it just weeks before Fuchs was unmasked as a spy, the FBI regarded the timing as suspicious enough to interrogate Hamming.

Although Hamming described his role at Los Alamos as being that of a "computer janitor", he saw computer simulations of experiments that would have been impossible to perform in a laboratory.

"And when I had time to think about it," he later recalled, "I realized that it meant that science was going to be changed".

At the Bell Labs Hamming shared an office for a time with Claude Shannon.

The Mathematical Research Department also included John Tukey and Los Alamos veterans Donald Ling and Brockway McMillan.

Shannon, Ling, McMillan and Hamming came to call themselves the Young Turks.

"We were first-class troublemakers," Hamming later recalled.

"We did unconventional things in unconventional ways and still got valuable results. Thus management had to tolerate us and let us alone a lot of the time."

Although Hamming had been hired to work on elasticity theory, he still spent much of his time with the calculating machines.

Before he went home on one Friday in 1947, he set the machines to perform a long and complex series of calculations over the weekend, only to find when he arrived on Monday morning that an error had occurred early in the process and the calculation had errored off.

For his work, he received the Turing Award in 1968, being its third recipient.

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.