Reconcile---Computer Pioneers - Richard Wesley Hamming - highlights

Richard Wesley Hamming

Education: BS, mathematics, University of Chicago, 1937; MA, mathematics, University of Nebraska, 1938; PhD, mathematics, University of Illinois, 1942.

Professional Experience: Bell Telephone Laboratories; Naval Postgraduate School.

It was 1947, and Hamming was the Bell Telephone Laboratory computer evangelist. He was the one to whom the other Bell Labs researchers would turn when they found themselves mired in problems they were unable to solve with their then-current, hand-driven desk calculators. Hamming would show them how computers could get them going again.

"Dammit," he thought, "if a machine can find out that there is an error, why can't it locate where it is and change the setting of the relay from one to zero or zero to one?"

The friend told him: "I'm in Los Alamos, and there is something interesting going on down here. Come down and work." With not much more to go on except that he was needed for war work, Hamming took the train to New Mexico, and his wife followed a month later. They both began work on the Manhattan Project.

Hamming was taken to a large room where a group of IBM relay computers were clacking away. At night they cast eerie shadows in the dim light. It was science fiction come true, "the mad scientist's laboratory," Hamming recalled, telling IEEE Spectrum that his avid interest in science fiction ended that day.

When Hamming finally left Los Alamos for Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946, he joined a mathematics department that had recently hired Claude E. Shannon, Donald P. Ling, and Brockway McMillan. The four called themselves the Young Turks. All around 30 years of age, they shared a baptism in scientific research that had started with the war, and they were much alike.

"We were first-class troublemakers," Hamming said. "We did unconventional things in unconventional ways and still got valuable results. Thus management had to tolerate us and let us alone a lot of the time."

Hamming's contribution to digital filters arose out of his concern for teaching the analog computing specialists the new digital ways of thinking before they became ossified.

But being a first-class troublemaker does not make one universally popular. Some former colleagues from BTL recall Hamming as egotistical, and comment that he occasionally went off "half-cocked, after some half-baked idea," and he was slow to pick up on his misdirection. "He is very hard to work with," one former BTL scientist said, "because he does a lot of broadcasting and not a lot of listening."

Hamming appears to be aware of such feelings. He said, "To reform the system, you have to be willing not to be liked."

"I was so busy doing what I wanted that I couldn't give them the attention they deserved," Hamming said. "I knew in a sense that by avoiding management, I was not doing my duty by the organization," he said. "That is one of my biggest failures."

Frustrated at several points in his career by aging scientists who were taking up space and resources that, he believes, could have been put to better use by Young Turks like himself, Hamming resolved while still young to retire early and get out of the way. So he ended his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories after 30 years, at age 61.

He still believes his decision was the right one-that mathematicians are most productive early in their careers and their productivity drops off rapidly as they age.

He finds the students at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he is an adjunct professor, to be "marvelous." "There is no school I know of in which the students are better selected and more likely to be worth the trouble," he said. And he likes the idea that he is teaching people who in 30 years or so will be very important in the military organizations of this and other nations. But he misses the intellectual climate of BTL.

Hamming's philosophy of teaching is simple. Since he is preparing students for the year 2020, and he has no clue as to what technology they will be dealing with at that date, whatever subject he is teaching is really a class on learning to learn.

In a basic undergraduate-level circuit theory class, Hamming, who never studied circuit theory, goes through the text with the students, line by line. "I tell them that I will do very little writing on the blackboard. We will learn to read this book and learn how you go about following a book full of formulas."

Hamming still spends a lot of time reading journals to stay technically current on a range of scientific topics. But, he said, annoyed: "I don't keep up as well as I used to. I'm falling slowly behind. There is no way out of it. Frustrating? It's worse than frustrating!"

With few outside interests, he does not know what he will do with himself. "A friend told me recently," he recounted, "'Hamming, the day you quit teaching, you are going to fall apart." "He's probably right. When I left BTL, I knew that that was the end of my scientific career. When I retire from here, in another sense, it's really the end."