Hans Peter Luhn

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Hans Peter Luhn (* 1. July 1896 in Barmen ; † 19th August 1964 in Armonk , New York) was a German computer scientist at IBM , inventor of the Luhn algorithm and KWIC - indexing . He has been awarded over 80 patents.

Life

Luhn was born in Barmen in 1896 as the son of the printer's owner Peter Luhn and the grandson of the soap manufacturer August Luhn . After completing secondary school, Luhn moved to Switzerland to learn the printing trade and to take over the family business. His career as a printer was interrupted by service as a communications officer during World War I. After the war, Luhn started in the textile industry, which eventually brought him to the United States , where he invented a thread counter that is still sold today under the name Lunometer .

plant

From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, Luhn applied for a variety of patents. At the same time he continued to work in the textile industry and as an independent technical consultant. In 1941 he began as a senior research engineer and was soon promoted to Manager of the information retrieval research division .

His introduction to the documentation / information science industry came in 1947 when he was asked to work for IBM with James Perry and Malcom Dyson on a problem that involved finding chemical compositions stored in coded form.

Luhn found solutions to this and other problems with the help of punch cards , but often had to bypass the limitations of the machines available at the time.

Luhn devoted more and more of his time to the problems of obtaining and storing information and pioneered the use of data processing equipment to solve these problems. Luhn was one of the first to develop techniques that are taken for granted in information science today, such as B. Full text processing, keyword in context indexing ( KWIC ), auto-indexing, automatic abstraction and the concept of selective dissemination of information (SDI).

Two of Luhn's greatest achievements are the idea for an SDI system and the KWIC method of indexing. Today's SDI systems owe much to a publication by Luhn from 1958 ("A Business Intelligence System"), which described an "automated method for offering scientists and engineers up-to-date services". These services were aimed at people who needed assistance to keep up with the rapid growth in scientific and technical literature in the post-war period. At the same time, Luhn was the first to use the current term Business Intelligence for integrated data processing and analysis in companies.

Luhn was probably the first to which by means of hash functions information (numbers, words, phrases, etc.) in bucket (s .: buckets so redistributed) that access or the further processing is simplified. Such advanced algorithms have become important in encryption technology, graphics processing, telecommunications, and biology today.

The Luhn algorithm or the Luhn formula, also known as the "Modulo 10" or "mod 10" algorithm, was developed by Luhn in the 1960s as a method of checking identification numbers. Today it is used to verify credit card numbers , ISINs and, for example, in the account numbers of many banks.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ HANS PETER LUHN, MENTOR, 68, DIES; Data Processing Specialist Served IBM 20 Years . August 20, 1964, p. 29. Retrieved December 16, 2019. 
  2. ^ Hallam Stevens: Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm. . In: IEEE Spectrum , January 30, 2018, pp. 42–47 (en.), Accessed February 14, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Luhn, Hans Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Barmen , Germany
DATE OF DEATH 19th August 1964
Place of death Armonk, New York , United States