Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications.

[1] After retiring from the Bell Labs in 1976, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he worked as an adjunct professor and senior lecturer in computer science, and devoted himself to teaching and writing books.

He looked at Green's function and further developed Jacob Tamarkin's methods for obtaining characteristic solutions.

He married Wanda Little, a fellow student, on September 5, 1942,[5] immediately after she was awarded her own Master of Arts in English literature.

With World War II still ongoing, Hamming left Louisville in April 1945 to work on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, in Hans Bethe's division, programming the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists.

His wife Wanda soon followed, taking a job at Los Alamos as a human computer, working for Bethe and Edward Teller.

[5] Hamming later recalled that:Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate.

The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels."

"[7] Hamming remained at Los Alamos until 1946, when he accepted a post at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL).

When he later sold it just weeks before Fuchs was unmasked as a spy, the FBI regarded the timing as suspicious enough to interrogate Hamming.

The Mathematical Research Department also included John Tukey and Los Alamos veterans Donald Ling and Brockway McMillan.

"[2] Although Hamming had been hired to work on elasticity theory, he still spent much of his time with the calculating machines.

"[9] Hamming set himself the task of solving this problem,[3] which he realised would have an enormous range of applications.

This not only solved an important problem in telecommunications and computer science, it opened up a whole new field of study.

[18] In A Discipline of Programming (1976), Edsger Dijkstra attributed to Hamming the problem of efficiently finding regular numbers.

[2] In 1976 he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he worked as an adjunct professor and senior lecturer in computer science.

In the calculus book we are currently using on my campus, I found no single problem whose answer I felt the student would care about!

The problems in the text have the dignity of solving a crossword puzzle – hard to be sure, but the result is of no significance in life.

[5] Hamming attempted to rectify the situation with a new text, Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985).

He became Professor Emeritus in June 1997,[24] and delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before his death from a heart attack on January 7, 1998.

[24] Hamming's final recorded lecture series[25] is maintained by Naval Postgraduate School along with ongoing work[26] that preserves his insights and extends his legacy.