Richard Wesley Hamming (1915 - 1998)

Born 11 Feb 1915 in Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States

Ancestors

Died 7 Jan 1998 at age 82 in Monterey, Monterey, California, United States

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Biography

Richard Hamming is Notable.

Richard W. Hamming 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.

In 1945, he worked 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. Then he accepted a job at Bell Labs in 1946.

During the 1950s, he programmed one of the earliest computers, the IBM 650, and with Ruth A. Weiss developed the L2 programming language, one of the earliest computer languages, in 1956. It was widely used within the Bell Labs, and also by external users, who knew it as Bell 2. It was superseded by Fortran when the Bell Labs' IBM 650 was replaced by the IBM 704 in 1957.

He received the Turing Award in 1968.

His obituary as published by the National Academy of Engineering website.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92619

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award