Background
Luhn, Hans Peter was born on July 1, 1896 in Barmen, Germany. Son of Johann Peter and Emma Maria (Kahle) Luhn.
Luhn, Hans Peter was born on July 1, 1896 in Barmen, Germany. Son of Johann Peter and Emma Maria (Kahle) Luhn.
After he completed secondary school, Luhn moved to Switzerland to learn the printing trade so he could join the family business.
His inventions have found applications in diverse areas like computer science, the textile industry, linguistics, and information science. He was awarded over 80 patents. His career in printing was halted by his service as a communications officer in the German Army during World War I. After the war, Luhn entered the textile field, which eventually led him to the United States, where he invented a thread-counting gauge (the Lunometer) still on the market.
From the late twenties to the early forties, during which time he obtained patents for a broad range of inventions, Luhn worked in textiles and as an independent engineering consultant.
He joined International Business Machines Corporation as a senior research engineer in 1941, and soon became manager of the information retrieval research division. His introduction to the field of documentation/information science came in 1947 when he was asked to work on a problem brought to International Business Machines Corporation by James Perry and Malcolm Dyson that involved searching for chemical compounds recorded in coded form.
He came up with a solution for that and other problems using punched cards, but often had to overcome the limitations of the available machines by coming up with new ways of using them. By the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s, software became the means to surmount the limitations inherent in the punched card machines of the past
Luhn spent greater and greater amounts of time on the problems of information retrieval and storage faced by libraries and documentation centers, and pioneered the use of data processing equipment in resolving these problems.
"Luhn was the first, or among the first, to work out many of the basic techniques now commonplace in information science." These techniques included full-text processing. Hash codes; Key Word in Context indexing (see also Herbert Marvin Ohlman). Auto-indexing; automatic abstracting and the concept of selective dissemination of information (SDI).
Today"s SDI systems owe a great deal to a 1958 paper by Luhn, "A Business Intelligence System", which described an "automatic method to provide current awareness services to scientists and engineers" who needed help to cope with the rapid post-war growth of scientific and technical literature.
Luhn apparently coined the term business intelligence in that paper.
Member of advisory board School Library Science, University of Southern California since 1959. Member Institute Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association Computing Machinery, Association Symbolic Logic, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Special Libraries Association, American Churches, Society, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Dokumentation, Federation International de Documentation, American Documentation Institute (president since 1963).
Married Margaret Herreshoff, December 21, 1929. Married second, Genevieve Douglass, April. Children: Diana (Mistress Ted Tower), Hans Peter, Christopher Brown Herreshoff.