Preface
“Some succeed because they are destined to, but most succeed because they are determined to.”—Henry van Dyke
A Legacy of Insight and Inspiration
If you are fortunate, you may encounter someone who inspires and enables your life — a caring relative, a powerful role model, a best friend, or a mentor.
In early 2017, I rediscovered a personal letter dated June 1983 from Richard Wesley Hamming (1915–1998), an eminent engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and scholar who served as my doctoral advisor between 1978 and 1982. Reading his kind and supportive words written 34 years earlier, I reflected on the significant benefits I received from being his protégé. I first thought of writing an article about this gifted scholar as a tribute because while Hamming inspired, encouraged, and enabled countless individuals throughout his life, no scholarly biography existed.
Hamming’s contributions to mathematics, computer science, and telecommunications were groundbreaking, particularly his development of error-correcting codes (ECC), which revolutionized error detection and correction in digital communication. Hamming made foundational contributions to many fields, including information theory, digital filters, computational science, numerical methods, and education. Beyond his technical achievements, Hamming was widely regarded as a visionary intellectual for his deep philosophical reflections on science and computing. He famously emphasized the importance of insight over mere computation, stating, “The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.” His work and ideas continue to influence researchers and engineers to this day.
During the first year of my research, I uncovered published and unpublished writings from his time working at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories (1946–1976) and NPS (1976–1998)[2]. Over the next 2 years, I fortunately located 15 coworkers and relatives whose recollections helped me understand Hamming' qualities: curiosity, determination, and pursuit of excellence.
To capture Hamming’s essence and promote an understanding of his legacy for others, I decided to create a book that, like Hamming himself, would inspire and empower others. My motivation for attempting to create this book stemmed from my extensive research findings and the words of Carl Sagan, one of the most outstanding scientific communicators of his generation. Paraphrasing from his 1970 book Cosmos: What an astonishing thing a book is. You’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time and are proof that humans can work magic [2].
An effective way to write history is to focus on the creation, development, and mastery of ideas and inventions. By uncovering the people, places, events, and challenges that most influenced Richard Wesley Hamming, I aimed to provide a comprehensive view of his life, with an in-depth look at his unique experiences, challenges, achievements, and professional journey. I wanted you, the reader, to learn from his life story, benefit from his lessons, and become as inspired as I was as his protégé and biographer. Discovering the details of his world-class contributions and the stories of those he motivated helped me structure this biography for my driving vision—that a legacy tribute involves more than listing an individual’s attempts and accomplishments; it should also reveal how this individual inspired and enabled succeeding generations.
Hamming worked on important problems and was unafraid of challenging contemporary mathematics, science, and engineering teachings. He wanted his contemporaries and succeeding individuals to be the best practitioners they could be. His writings and lectures gave us his inspirational vision and encouraged us to “Think Great Thoughts.” Hamming’s capstone book, Learning to Learn, the Art and Science of Engineering, 1996, combines the rigor of engineering, mathematics, and science with the subtlety of philosophy. As the novelist Alexandre Dumas (1824–1895) said in the book The Count of Monte Cristo, “There are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, and the second requires philosophy” [3]. Hamming had both.
Researching and authoring this biography took me over 7 years, much longer than a more experienced biographer might have taken. I could not publish this tribute to my mentor and friend until I found the right words to preserve his legacy, bid farewell to Hamming, and share his valuable lessons with future generations. Whether you are interested in the History of Science and Mathematics in the 20th century, how Hamming developed his insightful contributions or the valuable and timeless lessons he left for us, I hope this biography shows you how he enabled many to greatness and, like Hamming himself, inspire you to be the best you can be. After years of research and writing, I am ready to tell the story of my exceptional mentor. As Hamming often said at the start of a lecture, “Shall we begin?”
I believe that most things happen for a reason (causality). In 2017, I discovered that Hamming’s wife, Wanda, back in 2000, had donated seven sealed boxes that contained photographs, awards, copies of papers, and previously unknown documents—including some on ECC to the NPS library. Intriguingly, Richard or Wanda may have chosen to leave these for some future individual doing scholarly research about Hamming’s life to find. This possibility is one of the reasons that I chose to write this tribute biography.