Richard Hamming was an American mathematician who made seminal contributions to information theory and digital communications. Some of his notable achievements include developing Hamming codes to detect and correct errors in digital data transmission, introducing the concept of Hamming distance to quantify the number of differences between codewords, and devising the Hamming window, an improved digital filter. He worked on the Manhattan Project during World War 2 and later spent his career at Bell Labs, where he pioneered early computer programming and error-correcting codes. Hamming received the prestigious Turing Award in 1968 for his contributions to information theory and digital communications.