Hamming, Richard W.
S. Philip Morgan · Encyclopedia of Computer Science · 2003
Richard Wesley Hamming (Fig. 1), mathematician, pioneer computer scientist, and professor, was born in Chicago on 11 February 1915. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois in 1942. After brief teaching positions at the University of Illinois and the University of Louisville, he was recruited in 1945 to work at Los Alamos to run the IBM machines that were doing atomic bomb calculations. In 1946 he joined Bell laboratories where his career became centered on bringing large-scale scientific computation into Bell Labs. He retired from Bell Labs in In 1976 and moved to the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, Where he taught for 21 years and became Distinguished Professor Emeritus of computer science just before his death on 7 January 1998.