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Richard W. Hamming

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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 an interest 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 of cutting-edge innovations. He formed a view of mathematics, arising from his Los Alamos experience, that computation was of major importance. However, it made him skeptical of the standard approach that emphasized formal abstract mathematical theories.

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