Richard Wesley Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming (born Feb. 11, 1915, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Jan. 7, 1998, Monterey, Calif.) was an American mathematician. Hamming received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Illinois. In 1945 he was the chief mathematician for the Manhattan Project. After World War II, he joined Claude E. Shannon at Bell Laboratories, where in 1950 he invented Hamming codes, which are used in telecommunications. He realized that, by the appending of a parity check...