Richard Hamming (1915 – 1998)
In the late 1940s, Richard Hamming, working at Bell Labs, was exasperated with the high level of errors occurring in the electro-mechanical computing equipment he was using. Punched card machines were constantly misreading, forcing him to restart his programs. He decided to do something about it. This was when error-correcting codes were invented.
A simple way to detect errors is to send a message twice. If both versions agree, they are probably correct; if not, there is an error somewhere. But the discrepancy gives us no clue where the error lies. Sensing the message three times is better: if two versions agree, we assume they are correct and ignore the third version. But there is a serious overhead: the total data transmitted is three times the data volume; the information factor is 1/3.
ThatsMaths 