Professor Richard W. Hamming spent the last decades of his life at Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) teaching young officers how to think and learn.  This page provides links to his recorded lecture series Learning to Learn: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, along with much ongoing NPS work that preserves and extends his legacy.

Richard Wesley Hamming (1915-1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing (or Hamming bound), Hamming graph concepts, and the Hamming distance.  Wikipedia

ACM A.M. Turing Award, Richard W. Hamming, United States, 1968.  Often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Computer Science, the Turing Award is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing.  Citation: "For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes."

IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal is awarded for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology.  The medal was established in 1988 with Richard Hamming as initial namesake awardee.  Citation: "For exceptional and pioneering contributions to information sciences and systems, and for inspiring generations of researchers in these fields."
 

Life-Long Learners

• Hamming on Hamming: Learning To Learn online course offered by NPS April-June 2022. 
  • Turing Award winner Richard W. Hamming's original course “Learning to Learn: Art of Doing Science and Engineering” has been fully digitized and placed online. This course presents distilled career insights of a preeminent thinker, spread across a complete range of topics in modern science.  Learning how to pursue novel research is presented by example.
  • Includes Learning to Learn book chapters and synopsis presentations.
  • Primary site is NPS MS Teams channel.
  • Legacy site is NPS Sakai CLE.
• Hamming on Hamming: Learning to Learn YouTube site offers our best-quality video encodings produced to date.
  • Also linked on NPS YouTube Playlists.
• Richard W. Hamming Collection page at NPS Calhoun Library.
• Richard W. Hamming content (digitized) in NPS Archive Calhoun.
• Hamming gitlab.nps.edu archive for version control of course assets and issue tracking.
• Hamming NPS Faculty Award honorees for excellence in teaching and interdisciplinary research.
• NPS Hamming Supercomputer for High-Performance Computing (HPC)
   

Developers

• Additional work on Hamming Archive is always slowly steadily progressing.
• NPS Archive (Calhoun) where Learning to Learn videos can be streamed, viewed.
• Box.com site with Learning to Learn videos is an interim-storage working area for large files.
   

Contact

• Email feedback and improvement suggestions are welcome.