Hamming distance in the context of "Richard Hamming"

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⭐ Core Definition: Hamming distance

In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings or vectors of equal length is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different. In other words, it measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or equivalently, the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other. In a more general context, the Hamming distance is one of several string metrics for measuring the edit distance between two sequences. It is named after the American mathematician Richard Hamming.

A major application is in coding theory, more specifically to block codes, in which the equal-length strings are vectors over a finite field.

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👉 Hamming distance in the context of Richard Hamming

Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 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.

Born in Chicago, Hamming attended the University of Chicago, the University of Nebraska and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in mathematics under the supervision of Waldemar Trjitzinsky (1901–1973). In April 1945, he joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he programmed the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. He left to join the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946. Over the next fifteen years, he was involved in nearly all of the laboratories' most prominent achievements. For his work, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1968, being its third recipient.

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Hamming distance in the context of Metric space

In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of distance between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are a general setting for studying many of the concepts of mathematical analysis and geometry.

The most familiar example of a metric space is 3-dimensional Euclidean space with its usual notion of distance. Other well-known examples are a sphere equipped with the angular distance and the hyperbolic plane. A metric may correspond to a metaphorical, rather than physical, notion of distance: for example, the set of 100-character Unicode strings can be equipped with the Hamming distance, which measures the number of characters that need to be changed to get from one string to another.

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Hamming distance in the context of Metric (mathematics)

In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of distance between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are a general setting for studying many of the concepts of mathematical analysis and geometry.

The most familiar example of a metric space is 3-dimensional Euclidean space with its usual notion of distance. Other well-known examples are a sphere equipped with the angular distance and the hyperbolic plane. A metric may correspond to a metaphorical, rather than physical, notion of distance. For example, the set of 100-character Unicode strings can be equipped with the Hamming distance, which measures the number of characters that need to be changed to get from one string to another.

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Hamming distance in the context of Coding theory

Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes and their respective fitness for specific applications. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error detection and correction, data transmission and data storage. Codes are studied by various scientific disciplines—such as information theory, electrical engineering, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science—for the purpose of designing efficient and reliable data transmission methods. This typically involves the removal of redundancy and the correction or detection of errors in the transmitted data.

There are four types of coding:

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LINKED FROM (PARENTS)
← Metric space ← Metric (mathematics) ← Metric geometry ← Distance function ← Coding theory ← Metric spaces ← Richard Hamming ← Quotient metric space
LINKS TO (CHILDREN)
Information theory → String (computer science) → Symbol → String metric → Edit distance → Richard Hamming → Coding theory → Block code → Vector space → Finite field →