Charles Leonard Hamblin

Charles Leonard Hamblin
Born
Charles Leonard Hamblin

(1922-11-20)20 November 1922
Petersham, New South Wales, New South Wales
Died14 May 1985(1985-05-14) (aged 62)
Darling Point, New South Wales, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation(s)Philosopher
Logician
Computer scientist
Known forReverse Polish notation

Charles Leonard Hamblin (20 November 1922 – 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales) in Sydney.[1]

Among his most well-known achievements in the area of computer science was the introduction of Reverse Polish Notation[2][3] and the use in 1957 of a push-down pop-up stack.[4] This preceded the work of Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson on use of a push-pop stack.[5] The stack had been invented by Alan Turing in 1946 when he introduced such a stack in his design of the ACE computer. In philosophy, Hamblin is known for his book Fallacies, a standard work in the area of the false conclusions in logic. In formal semantics, Hamblin is known for his computational model of discourse as well as Hamblin semantics (or alternative semantics), an approach to the semantics of questions.

  1. ^ Jim Mackenzie and Philip Staines, "Charles Leonard Hamblin, 1922–1985", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 63, 1985, Issue 3, p. 384. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  2. ^ Peter McBurney, "Tribute to an Aussie computer science pioneer", The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 November 2003. Retrieved 25 November 2003.
  3. ^ By the mid-1970s, the majority of scientists in the Western world were using calculators based on the Reverse Polish Notation logic system developed by UNSW’s Professor Charles Hamblin, UNSW Newsroom, unsw.edu.au. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  4. ^ C. L. Hamblin, "An Addressless Coding Scheme based on Mathematical Notation", May 1957, N.S.W. University of Technology. (typescript)
  5. ^ Bauer, F.L., and Samelson, K., Sequential Formula Translation, Communications of the ACM 3(2): 76–83, 1960. A very influential paper for compilers