Richard Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications, including the Hamming code, the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, the sphere-packing or Hamming bound, Hamming graph concepts and the Hamming distance. In April 1945 he joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed solutions to equations from the project's physicists, then joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946, where he was involved in nearly all of the laboratory's most prominent achievements over the next fifteen years. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1968, its third recipient.