Richard Hamming: The ‘Computer Janitor’ of the Manhattan Project, (a short story about how digital error correction was founded)


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Message 2150863 - Posted: 2 Aug 2025, 13:52:13 UTC

Richard Hamming: The ‘Computer Janitor’ of the Manhattan Project
If you've ever used a memory stick, streamed audio without glitches, or received deep-space telemetry from a probe billions of miles away, you’ve already encountered Richard Hamming’s work.

Richard Hamming’s contributions to digital error correction laid the foundation for how modern computing systems detect and correct mistakes in data

But like many key figures in electronics history, his path from mathematics to computer engineering involved a series of detours, breakthroughs, and one very frustrating weekend.
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Message boards : Science (non-SETI) : Richard Hamming: The ‘Computer Janitor’ of the Manhattan Project, (a short story about how digital error correction was founded)


 
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