Background
Richard Wesley Hamming was born on February 11, 1915, in Chicago, Illinois, United States to Richard J. and Mabel G. (Redfield) Hamming.
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, Illinois 60637, United States
Richard Hamming received his Bachelor of Science at the University of Chicago in 1937.
Hamming was recognized with the Richard W. Hamming Medal, which was named for him.
Richard Hamming during his study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming
Richard Wesley Hamming was born on February 11, 1915, in Chicago, Illinois, United States to Richard J. and Mabel G. (Redfield) Hamming.
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.
In 1945 Hamming began 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 remained at Los Alamos until 1946, when he accepted a post at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Hamming's research career began at Bell Laboratories in 1946, in the early days of electronic computers, and included the invention of the error-correcting codes. His pioneering work with computer error checking and correction came in 1947 and was named the Hamming Codes.
In the 1970s he shifted to teaching, and at his death, he was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Richard Hamming wrote: "Religion, unfortunately, enters into discussions of the problem of machine thinking, and hence we have both vitalistic and non-vitalistic theories of “machines vs. humans”. For the Christian religions, their Bible says, “God made Man in His image”. If we can, in turn, create machines in our image then we are in some sense the equal of God, and this is a bit embarrassing! Most religions, one way or the other, make man into more than a collection of molecules, indeed man is often distinguished from the rest of the animal world by such things as a soul, or some other property. As to the soul, in the Late Middle Ages some people, wanting to know when the soul departed from the dead body, put a dying man on a scale and watched for the sudden in weight - but all they saw was a slow loss as the body decayed - apparently the soul, which they were sure the man had, did not have material weight. Even if you believe in evolution, still there can be a moment when God, or the gods, stepped in and gave man special properties which distinguish him from the rest of living things. This belief in an essential difference between man and the rest of the world is what makes many people believe machines can never, unless we ourselves become like the gods, be the same as a human in such details as thinking, for example. Such people are forced, like the above-mentioned Jesuit trained engineer, to make the definition of thinking to be what machines cannot do."
Hamming 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 but had no children.