Hans Peter Luhn
Hans Peter Luhn ( born July 1, 1896 in Barmen, † August 19, 1964 ) was a German computer scientist at IBM, inventor of the Luhn algorithm and the KWIC indexing. He has been granted over 80 patents.
Life
Luhn was born in 1896 as son of the printing company owner Peter Luhn and grandson of the soap manufacturer, August Luhn in Barmen. After his high-school diploma Luhn moved to Switzerland to learn the printing trade and take over the family business. His career as a printer was interrupted by service as a communications officer in the First World War. After the war Luhn began in the textile industry, which eventually brought him to the United States, where he invented a thread counter, which is sold today under the name Lunometer.
Work
From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, Luhn notified a number of patents. At the same time he continued to work in the textile industry and as an independent technical consultant. In 1941 he started as a senior research engineer ( upper test engineer ) and soon became the manager of the information retrieval research division ( Head of Information Procurement Department) carried.
His introduction to the Dokumentations-/Informations-Wissenschaft industry came in 1947, when he was asked to work for IBM along with James Perry and Malcolm Dyson on a problem which involved the search for stored in coded form chemical compositions.
Luhn found for this and other problems solution by means of punch cards, however he had for often the limitations of the then-available machines deal by finding new ways to use the latter.
Luhn spent more and more of his time to the problems of information gathering and storage, and a pioneer in the use of computers to solve these problems. Luhn was the first or among the first, the techniques developed, which of course are now in the information science. These techniques included full text processing, Keyword in Context Indexing ( KWIC ), auto - indexing, automatic abstraction and the concept of selective dissemination of information ( Selective Dissemination of Information SDI).
Two of the largest Luhns 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 in 1958 ("A Business Intelligence System"), which described an " automated method to provide scientists and engineers recency - aware services ." These services were aimed at people who support needed to keep up with the rapid postwar growth of scientific and technical literature. Luhn at the same time, making it the first to use today used the term Business Intelligence for the integrated data processing and analysis in enterprises.
The Luhn algorithm or Luhn formula, also known as the " modulus 10 " - or "mod 10 " algorithm, was developed in the 1960s by Hans Peter Luhn as a method of verification of identification numbers. He now finds for the verification of credit card numbers, of ISINs and account numbers, for example, in many banks use.