Hans Peter Luhn

Hans Peter Luhn (1896-1964) was a German American inventor.

Life

Hans Peter Luhnwas born on July 1, 1896 in Barmen (now part of Wuppertal), Germany. After secondary school, he moved to Switzerland to learn the printing trade to join the family business. During World War I he was a communications officer in the German Army. After the war Luhn entered the textile field, which eventually led him to the United States, where he worked in textiles and as an independent engineering consultant and obtained a broad range of patents for inventions. In 1941 he joined IBM as a senior research engineer at the IBM headquarters in Armonk, NY, and soon became manager of the information retrieval research division.

His introduction to the field of documentation/information science came in 1947 when he was asked to work on a problem brought to IBM by James W. Perry and Malcolm Dyson that involved searching for chemical compounds recorded in coded form. Luhn came up with a solution for that and other problems using punched cards, but often had to overcome the limitations of the available machines by coming up with new ways of using them. By the dawn of the computer age in the 1950's, software became the means to surmount the limitations inherent in the punched card machines of the past.

Luhn spent greater and greater amounts of time on the problems of information retrieval and storage faced by libraries and documentation centers, and pioneered the use of data processing equipment in resolving these problems. Luhn retired from IBM in 1961 and spent the remaining years of his life traveling, lecturing internationally and inventing. He died on August 19, 1964 in Armonk, NY.

Contributions

Luhn is best known for his co-invention of KeyWord In Context (KWIC) indexing, an extremely inexpensive form of topical indexing. A set of cards was punched with each card containing a single bibliographical record including, minimally, a document identifier and the title. The cards could then be used to generate automatically an alphabetical index of title words with each occurrence of each word on a separate line with the rest of the title adjacent to it in order to to indicate the context of that use if that title word.

Luhn's idea for a selective dissemination of information (SDI) system, an automatic method to provide current awareness services to scientists and engineers, was also influential. He was also instrumental in creating the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology initially edited by Carlos Cuadra.

Luhn also pioneered in the development and application of a wide range of automatic measuring and controlling devices, binary arithmetic systems, switching devises, serial binary computers, electronic information scanning, and storage and retrieval devices. The "Luhn algorithm" is a a checksum formula used to validate a variety of different identification numbers. [1]

Publications

H.P. Luhn: Pioneer of information science – Selected works, ed. by C. K. Schultz. New York: Spartan Books, 1968. Reprints 30 of his 41 publications, with a bibliography of all his publications (pp 287-289), a partial citation index (pp 290-298), a list of his US patents (pp 285-286), and four biographical essays about him (pp 3-30).

• "The automatic creation of literature abstracts." IBM Journal of research and development 2, no. 2 (1958): 159-165. [2]
• "A business intelligence system." IBM Journal of research and development 2, no. 4 (1958): 314-319.
• Keyword-in-context index for technical literature (KWIC index). Yorktown Heights, N.Y. : International Business Machines Corp., Advanced Systems Development Division, 1959. ASDD report; RC-127. [3] Also American Documentation 11, no 4 (1960): 288-295.
• "Selective dissemination of new scientific information with the aid of electronic processing equipment." American Documentation 12, no. 2 (1961): 131-138.
• "A new method of recording and searching information." American Documentation 4, no. 1 (1953): 14-16. [4]

Offices

• American Documentation Institute. President, 1964.

Awards

• American Society for Infornation Science. Award of Merit, 1974.

Further reading

• H.P. Luhn: Pioneer of information science – Selected works, ed. by C. K. Schultz. (New York: Spartan Books, 1968) contains four biographical essays by Claire K. Schultz (pp 3-15), Helena Moore (pp 16-20), Robert A. Fairthorne (pp 21-23) and Mary Elizabeth Stevens (pp 24-30).
• Harvey, John F. "Luhn, Hans Peter (1896-1964)." In: Dictionary of American library biography, ed. by Bohdan S. Wynar. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1978, pp 324-326.
• "Hans Peter Luhn." Wikipedia [5]
• Burke, Colin B. America's information wars: The untold story of information systems in America's conflicts and politics from World War II to the internet age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Williams, Robert V. "Hans Peter Luhn and Herbert M. Ohlman: Their roles in the origins of keyword‐in‐context/permutation automatic indexing." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, no. 4 (2010): 835-849.
• Stevens, Hallam. "Hans Peter Luhn and the birth of the hashing algorithm." IEEE spectrum 55, no. 2 (2018): 44-49.