Hamming, "Foundations of the Digital (Discrete) Revolution" (March 30, 1995)
Channel: securitylectures
Date: 29/09/2012

Intro: We are approaching the end of the revolution of going from signaling with continuous signals to signaling with discrete pulses, and we are now probably moving from using pulses to using solitons as the basis for our discrete signaling. Many signals occur in Nature in a continuous form (if you disregard the apparent discrete structure of things built out of molecules and electrons). Telephone voice transmission, musical sounds, heights and weights of people, distance covered, velocities, densities, etc. are examples of continuous signals. At present we usually convert the continuous signal almost immediately to a sampled discrete signal; the sampling being usually at equally spaced intervals in time and the amount of the signal being quantized to a comparatively few levels. Quantization is a topic we will ignore in these chapters, though it is important in some situations, especially in large scale computations with numbers. Why has this revolution happened?



The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" was the capstone course by Dr. Richard W. Hamming (1915-1998) for graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California. 

This course is intended to instill a "style of thinking" that will enhance one's ability to function as a problem solver of complex technical issues. With respect, students sometimes called the course "Hamming on Hamming" because he relates many research collaborations, discoveries, inventions and achievements of his own. This collection of stories and carefully distilled insights relates how those discoveries came about. Most importantly, these presentations provide objective analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as Dr. Hamming, his associates and other major thinkers, in computer science and electronics, progressed through the grand challenges of science and engineering in the twentieth century.