Hamming, Richard Wesley

Hamming, Richard Wesley

(born Feb. 11, 1915, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Jan. 7, 1998, Monterey, Calif.) U.S. mathematician. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. In 1945 he was the chief mathematician for the Manhattan Project. After the war, he joined Claude E. Shannon at Bell Laboratories, where in 1950 he invented Hamming codes. He realized that, by the appending of a parity check (an extra bit or block of bits) to each transmitted “word,” transmission errors could be corrected automatically, without having to resend the message. He is famous for saying, “The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.” He received the Turing Award in 1968.