Richard Hamming
The Hamming code, developed in the late 1940s, is an error-detecting and error-correcting scheme that allows digital systems to identify and repair single-bit transmission errors automatically — a solution whose elegance derives from the mathematical structure Hamming brought to the problem of unreliable computing machinery.
Richard Wesley Hamming was born in Chicago on February 11, 1915, and attended Crane High School before pursuing higher education at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He worked as a mathematician, engineer, and computer scientist, and also served as a university teacher. These overlapping roles gave his career a practical orientation: the problems he addressed were not purely abstract but arose from the demands of operating real machines under real conditions. Beyond the Hamming code, his contributions include the Hamming distance, the Hamming weight, the Hamming bound, the Hamming window, and the Hamming graph — a body of work in coding theory and digital signal processing that carries his name across several distinct subfields.
Hamming received the Turing Award, the ACM Fellow distinction, the Harold Pender Award, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal — the last of these now bearing his name in recognition of contributions to information science. He died in Monterey on January 7, 1998.
Quotes by Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming's insights on:
If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on.
While the problem of ai can be viewed as, “Which of all the things humans do can machines also do?,” I would prefer to ask the question in another form: “Of all of life’s burdens, which are those machines can relieve, or significantly ease, for us?
Moral: to the extent you can choose, work on problems you think will be important.
In closing I want to remind you yet again of Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” Yes, it is a matter of luck just what you do; it is much less luck you will do something if you prepare yourself to succeed. “Creativity” is just another name for the great successes which make a difference in history.
Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance.
The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.
You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don’t mind. But to yourself try to be honest.
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.