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Dr. Martin Mandelberg presented the Richard Wesley Hamming Legacy Project during a campus presentation on 24 October 2022. This seven-year project features a select compilation of 30,000 pages of the legendary professor Richard Hamming’s research findings, an online archive of lectures on video, and much more.
Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) alumnus Dr. Martin Mandelberg has embarked on a significant effort to honor one of the 20th century’s greatest minds, the esteemed computer scientist and mentor, NPS Distinguished Professor Richard Wesley Hamming. Mandelberg provided an overview of his Hamming Legacy Project during a special presentation in Reed Hall on the NPS campus on July 18.
As Hamming’s only doctoral advisee, Mandelberg reflected on Hamming’s teaching career and mentorship, which spanned 22 years at NPS from 1976 to 1998. “He developed early on the skills, knowledge, and insights to mentor people,” said Mandelberg. “He was the ideal professor for guiding master’s theses because he could hop from problem to problem.”
“You should be rewarded for what you attempt because there are valuable lessons in failure, and Richard Hamming understood that,” he continued.
Mandelberg obtained nearly 30,000 pages of research findings while developing the Hamming archive, a task that took him 30 months to complete. He introduced an online archive of Hamming materials, featuring digitally remastered videos of NPS classes taught by Hamming, along with a preview of previously unavailable research findings from the Richard Hamming book collection, which will soon be accessible through the NPS archive, Calhoun.
“[Hamming] is a great role model to set the standard,” said Lt. Ashton Miller, an NPS electrical engineering student eager to access these rich resources, including the various Richard Hamming books, that will be available to him and the rest of the student body in the near future.
“Hamming was a good and valued friend,” said Dr. Herschel Loomis, an NPS Distinguished Professor and colleague of Hamming. “One of the great privileges of my career was to work daily with this intellectual giant.”
Richard Hamming was one of the world’s most distinguished computer scientists, renowned for his contributions to coding and information theory, including innovations like the Hamming code and the Hamming spectral window. He directed the Manhattan Project Computing Facility, and later at Bell Labs, he introduced error-correcting codes and performed pioneering work in operating systems and programming languages.
The donated contents of the Richard Wesley Hamming Legacy Project will join the existing Richard W. Hamming Collection at the Dudley Knox Library, which includes his annotated papers from 1947-1997, scientific medals and awards such as the Piore Award, Turing Prize, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Hamming Medal, as well as lecture videos, diaries, and photographs.
Richard Wesley Hamming in his signature red plaid jacket.
