Biography
Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix ), the Hamming window , Hamming numbers , sphere-packing (or Hamming bound ), Hamming graph concepts, and the Hamming distance . Born in Chicago, Hamming attended the University of Chicago , the University of Nebraska and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign , where he wrote his doctoral thesis in mathematics under the supervision of Waldemar Trjitzinsky (1901–1973). In April 1945, he joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory , where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. He left to join the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946. Over the next fifteen years, he was involved in nearly all of the laboratories' most prominent achievements. For his work, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1968, being its third recipient. [ 1 ] After retiring from the Bell Labs in 1976, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California , where he worked as an adjunct professor and senior lecturer in computer science , and devoted himself to teaching and writing books. He delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before he died from a heart attack on January 7, 1998. Education: University of Chicago BS University of Nebraska MA University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (1968) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1979) Harold Pender Award (1981) IEEE Hamming Medal (1988)
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
Browse More
Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)