Richard Wesley Hamming, developer of the Hamming codes, died Wednesday, January 7, 1998 of a heart attack in Monterey, California
Professor Hamming was born in Chicago in 1915. He received a B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1937, an M.S. from the University of Nebraska in 1939, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1942, all in mathematics. He served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville before joining the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1945. At Los Alamos, he worked to maintain the computer systems used in developing the first atomic bomb. His frustrations with those machines, with their propensity for failures due to bit flips, led eventually to his work on error correction and detection.
In 1946, Hamming left Los Alamos for Bell Telephone Laboratories, joining a mathematics department which had recently hired Claude E. Shannon, Donald P. Ling, and Brockway McMillan. Calling themselves the "Young Turks," the four "were first-class trouble makers" who "did unconventional things in unconventional ways" Hamming told the IEEE Spectrum in a 1993 interview. Nonetheless, the four got valuable results. "Thus management had to tolerate us and let us alone a lot of the time." Hamming was originally hired by Bell Labs to work on elasticity theory but spent more and more time working on computers, publishing his classic work "Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes" in the {\em Bell System Technical Journal} in 1950 and later going on to achieve advances in digital filtering and design the General Purpose System, an operating system for the early IBM 650.
Believing that mathematicians do their best work early in their careers, Hamming retired from Bell labs at the age of 61. Having served as a visiting professor at New York University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Stevens Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Irvine at various points in his career, Hamming accepted a chair of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate school in 1976, where he worked for 21 years teaching classes on information and coding theory, differential and integral calculus, and advanced topics in computer science until his retirement in June of 1997.
Giving a variety of talks and courses on "learning to learn" and "managing your own research," Hamming tried to teach young researchers to "work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way," believing that "greatness is a matter of style" and "knowledge and ability are like compound interest -- the more you do the more you can do, and the more opportunities are open for you."
Hamming authored more than 75 technical reports and nine books, including {\em Introduction to Applied Numerical Analysis} (1971), {\em Digital Filters} (1977), {\em Coding and Information Theory} (1980), {\em Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics} (1985), and {\em Introduction to Applied Numerical Analysis} (1989).
In addition to his research and teaching, Hamming was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), vice president of the Mathematical Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and editor for a variety of technical journals in computer science, mathematics, and engineering sciences.
Hamming was widely recognized for his contributions. In 1968, he received the Turing Prize from the ACM. He went on to win the IEEE Emmanuel R. Piore Award in 1979 for work in information processing. Hamming was the first recipient of the IEEE's annual Richard W. Hamming Medal, named in his honor in 1986. In 1988 he received the Harold Pender Award from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania for his work in algebraic coding theory and in 1996 the Eduard Rheim Foundation of Germany honored him with the Eduard Rheim Award for Achievement in Technology. Hamming was also nominated for the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award for contributions to science and the nation's defense. He was a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1980.
He is survived by his wife Wanda Hamming of Monterey, CA, nephew Robert Hamming of Nevada City, and niece Karen Werner of Bellevue, Washington.