In this biography
Quick facts
- Born
- 11 February 1915
- Died
- 7 January 1998
- Birthplace
- Chicago, United States
- Country
- United States
- Nationality
- Not independently established
- Known for
- Error-correcting codes
- Research setting
- Bell Laboratories, from 1946
- Later institution
- Naval Postgraduate School
Why this life matters
He made reliable communication a problem of deliberately structured redundancy.
Timeline
Key moments
Doctorate
Completed mathematics at Illinois.
Research record
Published the coding paper.
Teaching transition
Moved from Bell to NPS.
Mathematical training and wartime computation
Hamming studied at Chicago, Nebraska and Illinois, receiving his doctorate in 1942. After teaching at Louisville, he joined Los Alamos in 1945 and worked with relay-computer calculations.
The path linked mathematical training with the practical limitations of computing equipment. Reliability was a design problem in addition to a matter of careful operation.
Sources for this section: [1]
Checking a message
His 1950 paper organised parity checks so that their combined result could identify a single erroneous position.
Redundancy can be arranged to reveal more than a failed check. Its interpretation still depends on an error model: several changed bits can imitate the checking number of one change. The linked example makes that limit visible.
Sources for this section: [3]
A wider computational career
He joined Bell Laboratories in 1946. His work extended beyond coding to numerical integration, filtering and other computational methods.
These subjects concern different obstacles to useful computation: corrupted symbols, approximations in numerical work and the extraction of information from signals. A career account restricted to one named code would miss that range.
Sources for this section: [1]
Teaching after Bell Laboratories
At the Naval Postgraduate School, where he spent twenty-one years, Hamming became known for sustained attention to teaching and research judgement. His final lecture was in December 1997.
He had moved there after retiring from Bell in July 1976 and died in Monterey in January 1998.
The later teaching phase continued his concern with choosing worthwhile problems, alongside the earlier creation of technical methods.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions about Richard Hamming
- Does a single-error decoder correct any number of errors?
- No. The exercise includes a double change that mimics a single-error checking number.
Keep exploring
Lives connected to this story
- Claude Shannon
Compare another foundation of communication and information.
- Dennis Ritchie
Read a different Bell Laboratories computing career.
Sources and further reading
Explore the evidence
These references support the biography and offer further reading. Official records, first-person accounts and independent reporting provide different perspectives; image records document attribution and licensing.
- 1. Herschel H. Loomis Jr./David L. Potter, NAE Memorial Tributes 10, 2002Richard W. Hamming
- 2. Kenneth Stewart, Naval Postgraduate School, 2015Iconic researcher/teacher Richard Hamming maintains lasting legacy
- 3. R. W. Hamming, Bell System Technical Journal 29, 147โ160, 1950Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes
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