Post by Quest Global

It was 1947, and Richard Wesley Hamming, the computer evangelist of Bell Telephone Laboratory (BTL), was having a bad day. He was expecting a number of useful results from a large-scale relay computer that had been running for over two days. But the machine had had a failure early on, and Hamming had no results to give to his colleagues. He thought, "If a machine can find out that there is an error, why can't it locate where it is?" Frustrated, Hamming set out to find an efficient means by which computers could correct themselves. Soon he found a solution based on parity checking. His techniques for finding and correcting a single error in a stretch of data, as well as finding two errors and correcting one of them, became known as the #HammingCodes. His solution was used by BTL in computer systems and in telephone switching Systems, and developed later by others for multiple digital applications, from extracting data transmitted from space probes, to recovering jammed communications, to guaranteeing quality music from a CD. Hamming, the American mathematician who devised the error-correcting protocol which remains a critical feature of computing applications, was born on this day in 1915. #BornToEngineer #RichardHamming