Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I’m sure the audience here does not need reminding. He received his early education at the Universities of Chicago and Nebraska, and got his Ph.D. at Illinois; he then joined the Los Alamos project during the war. Afterwards, in 1946, he joined Bell Labs. And that is, of course, where I met Dick – when I joined Bell Labs in their physics research organization. In those days, we were in the habit of lunching together as a physics group, and for some reason this strange fellow from mathematics was always pleased to join us. We were always happy to have him with us because he brought so many unorthodox ideas and views. Those lunches were stimulating, I can assure you.
While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I’ve always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs and have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing. I think the record speaks for itself. It is too long to go through all the details, but let me point out, for example, that he has written seven books and of those seven books which tell of various areas of mathematics and computers and coding and information theory, three are already well into their second edition. That is testimony indeed to the prolific output and the stature of Dick Hamming.
I think I last met him – it must have been about ten years ago – at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. As always, he was tremendously entertaining. Just one more example of the provocative thoughts that he comes up with: I remember him saying, “There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.” Well, with Dick Hamming around, we don’t need a computer. I think that we are in for an extremely entertaining talk.
THE TALK: “You and Your Research” by Dr. Ri