Richard Wesley Hamming is best known for his work on error-detecting and error-correcting codes, which are now called Hamming codes. He also contributed a number of developments to programming languages in general and work on numerical analysis and the Hamming spectral window (used to smooth data before Fourier analysis is carried out).

Richard Wesley Hamming was born in Chicago in 1915. His initial schooling was Chicago-based and he graduated from the University of Chicago in 1937 with a B.S. in mathematics. Originally Hamming had wanted to study engineering but the only university offering him a scholarship was the University of Chicago, which did not have an engineering department, so Hamming chose mathematics instead. Hamming then moved to the University of Nebraska where he was awarded an M.A. in mathematics in 1939. Moving back to the Chicago area he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he gained a...