Richard Wesley Hamming (1915-1998)
Mathematician, TuringAward 1968. See http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hamming.html for his biography. Hamming is best known for his work on error-detecting and error-correcting codes (see HammingCode and HammingDistance).
Author of the book ArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.
YouAndYourResearch is a transcription of a talk Hamming gave at a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia series. Highly recommended.