Achieving Greatness
By Michael Floyd
Richard Hamming once wrote that "If you are to do important work then you must work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way. Without any one of the three, you may do good work but you will almost certainly miss real greatness." Hamming lived just miles from my home and over the past 20 or so years, served as an adjunct professor imparting such ideals on the students at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Sadly, Hamming passed away this January at the age of 82.
Hamming was no stranger to greatness. He is the namesake of the error correcting codes, Hamming codes, that were used in early computing and telephone-switching systems. As the story goes, while Hamming was working at Bell Labs in 1947, he was frustrated by the fact that computers of the time were subject to random errors caused by the Earth's surface radiation. He focused on the computers' binary representations and discovered that extra bits could be added to binary numbers to redundantly encode numerical quantities. Once encoded, any single bit could be verified against a redundant bit and, if need be, corrected. Hamming codes also detect the condition where two adjacent bits are corrupted, although the corrupted bit cannot be corrected.
In 1950, Hamming published the results of his work in "Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes," which appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal. This work was to become the basis for a new subject within information theory.
