The Art of Probability: For Scientists and Engineers

Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician, whose work had many implications for computer and communications engineering. Some of his contributions are: Hamming's code (or symbol) (which uses the Hamming matrix), the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, fill-sphere problems (or Hamming field), and Hamming distance. Hamming was born in Chicago on February 11, 1915, and attended the University of Chicago, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he wrote his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Vladimir Tregetzinsky (1901-1973). In April 1945 he joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed IBM's mechanical calculators that calculated solving equations provided by project physicists. He left the project to join Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946. Over the next fifteen years he was involved in nearly all of the laboratories' notable achievements. After retiring from Bell Laboratories in 1976, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, working there as an assistant professor and senior lecturer in computer science, devoting himself to teaching and writing books. He gave his last lecture in December 1997, a few weeks before he died of a heart attack on January 7, 1998.