1968 理查德·卫斯里·汉明

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Richard W. Hamming
  Photo-Essay

BIRTH:
11 February 1915, Chicago, Illinois, USA

DEATH:
7 January 1998, Monterey, California, USA

EDUCATION:
BS University of Chicago, Chicago, USA (1934 - mathematics); MA University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA (1939); PhD University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA (1942 - mathematics).

EXPERIENCE:
Instructor in Mathematics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois 1942-44; Assistant Professor, J.B. Speed Scientific School, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky1944-45; Manhattan project, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1945-46; Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1946-76; Member of the faculty Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, 1976-97; Adjunct Professor of Computer science Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, 1976-97.

HONORS AND AWARDS:
Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; IEEE Piore award 1979; $10,000 prize medal "The Richard W. Hamming Medal" named in his honor 1986 - 1st recipient of same 1988); Fellow, Association of Computing Machinery, 1994; Turing Award 1968; Member, National Academy of Engineering (1980); Harold Pender Award, University of Pennsylvania, 1981; Eduard Rheim Foundation Prize, 1996.

RICHARD W. HAMMING DL Author Profile link
United States – 1968
CITATION
For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.

SHORT ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACM TURING AWARD
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RESEARCH
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ADDITIONAL
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Richard Hamming was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA on February 11, 1915, the son of Richard J. Hamming and Mabel G. Redfield. He was brought up in Chicago where he attended school and realized that he was a more able mathematician than his teacher. He wanted to study engineering but the only offer of a scholarship came from the University of Chicago, which had no engineering department. He entered the University of Chicago receiving his B.S. in mathematics.

After his undergraduate studies he went to the University of Nebraska, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1939. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1942 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His doctoral dissertation, Some Problems in the Boundary Value Theory of Linear Differential Equations, was supervised by Waldemar Trjitzinsky (1901-1973). Hamming, however, developed interests in ideas that were quite far removed from his study of differential equations when he discovered George Boole's An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. He found Boole's book interesting, relevant, and believable. The ideas in it would prove highly significant later in his life when he became interested in coding theory.

After earning his doctorate, Hamming married Wanda Little on September 5, 1942. He taught first at the University of Illinois, and then at the J. B. Speed Scientific School of the University of Louisville. In 1945, encouraged by a friend, he joined the Manhattan Project, a U.S. government research project to produce an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. A month after he arrived at Los Alamos he was joined by his wife, who was also employed on the Manhattan Project. Hamming was put in charge of the IBM calculating machines that played a vital role in the project. He came in contact with many leading scientists, including Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The theoretical physicist Hans Bethe was his boss. Wanda Hamming began by doing computations with desk calculators, and later worked for Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller.

After the Manhattan Project ended Hamming remained at Los Alamos for six months, writing up details of the calculations they had done. He felt that it was important to try to understand exactly what had been achieved, and why it had been so successful. It was at this time that he realized that he had done the right thing by not studying engineering; engineers did much of the routine work, but mathematicians like himself were more critical to the cutting edge innovations. He formed a view of mathematics, arising from his Los Alamos experience, that computation was of major importance, but it made him skeptical of the standard approach that emphasized formal abstract mathematical theories.

In 1946 he accepted a position in the mathematics department at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. However, he didn't entirely break his link with Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, and made two week visits each summer as a consultant.

At Bell Labs he was able to work with both Claude Shannon, with whom he shared an office, and John Tukey. Some other young mathematicians had joined the Mathematical Research Department at Bell Labs just prior to Hamming. These included Donald Percy Ling and Brockway McMillan, who had been at Los Alamos at the same time as Hamming. Shannon, Ling, McMillan and Hamming called themselves the Young Turks. Hamming often related how they had all been affected by growing up in the depression, and all learned new skills with their war work. It led them, he said, to do unconventional things in unconventional ways. Hamming, for example, lunched with the physics group rather than his mathematics group, and they were fascinated by his unorthodox ideas and views. Not all his colleagues were happy to tolerate his unconventional ways. Some have described him as egotistical, saying he sometimes went off "half-cocked, after some half-baked idea." Unconventional ideas sometimes produce flashes of brilliance, but they sometimes also lead to failures.

Before discussing Hamming's highly significant work on error-correcting codes, we first note the many and varied problems he worked on in Bell Labs. These include problems involving design of telephone systems, traveling wave tubes, the equalization of television transmission lines, the stability of complex communication systems, and the blocking of calls through a telephone central office. He continued to work for Bell Telephones until 1976, although he became increasingly interested in teaching, and held visiting or adjunct professorships at Stanford University, the City College of New York, the University of California at Irvine and Princeton University between 1960 and 1976. After retiring from Bell Labs in 1976, he became a professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California. At this point he gave up his research career and concentrated on teaching and writing books. He believed that the way mathematics was being taught was wrong, and that the only way to change it was to write textbooks with a new approach. Here are two examples of his views on mathematics teaching:

We live in an age of exponential growth in knowledge, and it is increasingly futile to teach only polished theorems and proofs. We must abandon the guided tour through the art gallery of mathematics, and instead teach how to create the mathematics we need. In my opinion, there is no long-term practical alternative.

and

The way mathematics is currently taught it is exceedingly dull. In the calculus book we are currently using on my campus, I found no single problem whose answer I felt the student would care about! The problems in the text have the dignity of solving a crossword puzzle - hard to be sure, but the result is of no significance in life.

His attempt to move to a new way of teaching calculus is exhibited in his 1985 book Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics [8]. He said that the book is "very different from the standard texts and its success or failure will tell us something about the prospects for change and innovation." Other texts he wrote all attempted to change conventional approaches to the areas they studied.

Richard Hamming is best known for his work at Bell Labs on error-detecting and error-correcting codes. His fundamental paper on this topic, Error detecting and error correcting codes [1], appeared in April 1950 in the Bell System Technical Journal. This paper created an entirely new field within information theory. Hamming codes, Hamming distance and Hamming metric, standard terms used today in coding theory and other areas of mathematics, all originated in this classic paper and are of ongoing practical use in computer design. Details can be found here.

In 1956 Hamming worked on the IBM 650, an early vacuum tube, drum memory, computer. His work led to the development of a rudimentary programming language. Hamming also worked on numerical analysis, especially integration of differential equations. The Hamming spectral window, still widely used in computation, is a special type of digital filter designed to pass certain frequencies and discriminate against closely related frequencies.

In addition to the Turing Award, Hamming received many awards for his pioneering work. He was made a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1994. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded him the Emanuel R Piore Award in 1979.

The IEEE created "The Richard W. Hamming Medal" in his honor. He was the first recipient of this $10,000 prize medal in 1988. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1980, and received the Harold Pender Award from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. In 1996, in Munich, Hamming received the prestigious $130,000 Eduard Rheim Award for Achievement in Technology for his work on error correcting codes.

In 1997 Hamming retired from teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School and was made Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Shortly before he retired, he said that when he left Bell Labs, he knew that that was the end of his research career. It really would be the end, he said, when he retired from teaching. Indeed he was right, for having taught up to December 1997, he died of a heart attack in the following month. Richard Franke of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey wrote of Richard Hamming:

He will be long remembered for his keen insights into many facets of science and computation. I'll also long remember him for his red plaid sport coat and his bad jokes.

Author: Edmund F. Robertson



理查德-W-汉明
  照片-散文

出生地：美国
1915年2月11日，美国伊利诺伊州，芝加哥

逝世
1998年1月7日，美国加利福尼亚州蒙特雷市

学历：美国芝加哥大学学士（1934年--数学）；硕士
美国芝加哥大学学士学位（1934年--数学）；美国内布拉斯加州林肯市内布拉斯加州大学硕士学位（1939年）；美国伊利诺伊州厄巴纳-香槟市伊利诺伊大学博士学位（1942年--数学）。

工作经验。
1942-44年，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校数学讲师；1944-45年，肯塔基州路易斯维尔大学J.B.Speed科学学校助理教授；1945-46年，新墨西哥州洛斯阿拉莫斯曼哈顿项目；1946-76年，贝尔电话实验室；1976-97年，加利福尼亚州蒙特雷市海军研究生院教员成员；1976-97年，加利福尼亚州蒙特雷市海军研究生院计算机科学兼职教授。

荣誉和奖项。
电气和电子工程师学会会员；1979年IEEE Piore奖；1986年以他的名字命名的10,000美元奖章 "理查德-W-汉明奖章"--1988年第一位获奖者）；1994年计算机械协会会员；1968年图灵奖；国家工程院院士（1980年）；1981年宾夕法尼亚大学哈罗德-彭德奖；1996年爱德华-Rheim基金会奖。

RICHARD W. HAMMING DL作者简介链接
美国 - 1968年
参考文献
因其在数值方法、自动编码系统、检错和纠错码方面的工作。

简短注释的
书目
亚马逊图灵奖
讲座
研究
主题
额外的
材料
理查德-汉明于1915年2月11日出生在美国伊利诺伊州的芝加哥，是理查德-J-汉明和梅布尔-G-雷德菲尔德的儿子。他在芝加哥长大，在那里上学，发现自己是一个比老师更有能力的数学家。他想学习工程学，但唯一提供奖学金的是芝加哥大学，该大学没有工程系。他进入芝加哥大学获得了数学学士学位。

本科毕业后，他去了内布拉斯加大学，并于1939年获得了文学硕士学位。1942年，他在伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校获得了数学博士学位。他的博士论文《线性微分方程的边界值理论中的一些问题》是由Waldemar Trjitzinsky（1901-1973）指导的。然而，当汉明发现乔治-布尔的《思维规律的研究》时，他对那些与他的微分方程研究相去甚远的思想产生了兴趣。他发现布尔的书很有趣，很有意义，而且很可信。当他对编码理论感兴趣时，书中的观点在他后来的人生中被证明是非常重要的。

获得博士学位后，汉明于1942年9月5日与万达-利特尔结婚。他先是在伊利诺伊大学任教，然后在路易斯维尔大学的J.B.斯比德科学学院任教。1945年，在一位朋友的鼓励下，他加入了曼哈顿计划，这是一个美国政府在新墨西哥州洛斯阿拉莫斯生产原子弹的研究项目。在他到达洛斯阿拉莫斯一个月后，他的妻子也加入了，她也受雇于曼哈顿项目。汉明被安排负责IBM的计算机，这些计算机在项目中发挥了重要作用。他接触了许多领先的科学家，包括理查德-费曼、恩里科-费米、爱德华-特勒和J-罗伯特-奥本海默。理论物理学家汉斯-贝特是他的上司。万达-汉明开始是用桌上的计算器做计算，后来为恩里科-费米和爱德华-特勒工作。

曼哈顿计划结束后，汉明在洛斯阿拉莫斯呆了六个月，写下了他们所做的计算的细节。他觉得有必要尝试了解到底取得了什么成果，以及为什么它如此成功。正是在这个时候，他意识到他没有学习工程学是正确的；工程师做了很多常规工作，但像他这样的数学家对前沿的创新更为关键。他在洛斯阿拉莫斯的经历中形成了一种数学观，即计算是非常重要的，但这使他对强调正式抽象数学理论的标准方法持怀疑态度。

1946年，他接受了位于新泽西的贝尔电话实验室数学部的一个职位。然而，他并没有完全断绝与洛斯阿拉莫斯科学实验室的联系，每年夏天都会作为顾问进行为期两周的访问。

在贝尔实验室，他能够与克劳德-香农（与他共用一间办公室）和约翰-图基一起工作。在汉明之前，还有一些年轻的数学家也加入了贝尔实验室的数学研究部门。这些人包括唐纳德-珀西-林和布罗克韦-麦克米伦，他们与汉明同时在洛斯阿拉莫斯工作。Shannon、Ling、McMillan和Hamming自称为 "年轻的土耳其人"。汉明经常讲述他们如何在大萧条中成长，并在战争工作中学习新技能。他说，这使他们以非常规的方式做非常规的事情。例如，汉明与物理组而不是他的数学组共进午餐，他们对他非正统的想法和观点很着迷。并非所有的同事都乐意容忍他的非传统方式。有些人把他描述为自负，说他有时会 "半信半疑，追寻一些半生不熟的想法"。非常规的想法有时会产生闪光点，但有时也会导致失败。

在讨论汉明在纠错码方面非常重要的工作之前，我们首先注意到他在贝尔实验室所从事的许多不同问题。其中包括涉及电话系统设计、行波管、电视传输线的均衡、复杂通信系统的稳定性以及通过电话中心局阻断电话的问题。他继续为贝尔电话公司工作到1976年，尽管他对教学越来越感兴趣，并在1960年至1976年间在斯坦福大学、纽约城市学院、加州大学欧文分校和普林斯顿大学担任客座或兼职教授。1976年从贝尔实验室退休后，他成为位于加州蒙特雷的海军研究生院的计算机科学教授。此时，他放弃了他的研究事业，专注于教学和写书。他认为，现在的数学教学方式是错误的，改变它的唯一方法是用新的方法编写教科书。以下是他对数学教学看法的两个例子。

我们生活在一个知识呈指数增长的时代，只教授抛光的定理和证明是越来越徒劳的。我们必须放弃在数学艺术馆里的导游，而是教如何创造我们需要的数学。在我看来，没有长期实用的替代方法。

而且

目前教授数学的方式是非常枯燥的。在我们学校目前使用的微积分书中，我发现没有一个问题的答案是我觉得学生会关心的！课文中的问题都很有尊严。课文中的问题有如解决一个填字游戏的尊严--困难是肯定的，但结果对生活没有任何意义。

他试图转向一种新的微积分教学方式，这表现在他1985年出版的《应用于微积分、概率和统计的数学方法》一书中[8]。他说，这本书 "与标准文本有很大的不同，它的成功或失败将告诉我们一些关于变革和创新的前景"。他写的其他文本都试图改变其研究领域的传统方法。

理查德-汉明最著名的是他在贝尔实验室从事的错误检测和纠错代码工作。他关于这个主题的基本论文，错误检测和错误纠正代码[1]，于1950年4月出现在贝尔系统技术杂志上。这篇论文在信息理论中开创了一个全新的领域。汉明码、汉明距离和汉明度量，这些今天在编码理论和其他数学领域使用的标准术语，都起源于这篇经典论文，并在计算机设计中不断得到实际应用。详细情况可以在这里找到。

1956年，汉明在IBM 650上工作，这是一台早期的真空管、鼓形存储器、计算机。他的工作导致了一种初级编程语言的发展。汉明还从事数值分析工作，特别是微分方程的积分。汉明频谱窗仍然广泛用于计算，是一种特殊类型的数字滤波器，旨在通过某些频率并对密切相关的频率进行区分。

除了图灵奖之外，汉明还因其开创性的工作获得了许多奖项。他在1994年被授予计算机协会的研究员。电气和电子工程师协会（IEEE）于1979年授予他伊曼纽尔-皮奥雷奖。

IEEE为了纪念他，设立了 "理查德-W-汉明奖"。1988年，他是这个10,000美元奖章的第一个获得者。1980年，他被选为国家工程院院士，并在1981年获得宾夕法尼亚大学的哈罗德-彭德奖。1996年，在慕尼黑，汉明因其在纠错码方面的工作而获得了著名的13万美元的爱德华-瑞海姆技术成就奖。

1997年，汉明从海军研究生院的教学工作中退休，并被任命为杰出的荣誉教授。在他退休前不久，他说，当他离开贝尔实验室时，他知道那是他研究生涯的结束。他说，当他从教学岗位上退休后，这才是真正的结束。事实上他是对的，因为在教书到1997年12月的时候，他在接下来的一个月里死于心脏病发作。蒙特雷海军研究生院的理查德-弗兰克写道："理查德-汉明。

他将因其对科学和计算的许多方面的敏锐洞察力而被长期铭记。我也会长期记住他的红格子运动外套和他的坏笑话。

作者。埃德蒙-F-罗伯逊