Peter L. Hammer
Peter Ladislaw Hammer (December 23, 1936 – December 27, 2006) was an American mathematician native to Romania. He contributed to the fields of operations research and applied discrete mathematics through the study of pseudo-Boolean functions and their connections to graph theory and data mining.[1][2][3][4]
Biography
Hammer was born in Timișoara, Romania,[1] into a Hungarian speaking Jewish family.[5] He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Bucharest, earning a diploma in 1958[1] and a doctorate in 1965 under the supervision of Grigore Moisil.[6] In 1967, he and his wife (Anca Ivănescu) escaped Romania and defected to Israel. Hammer taught at the Technion from 1967 to 1979, at McGill University in Canada from 1969 to 1972, at the University of Waterloo from 1972 to 1983, and finally at Rutgers University in New Jersey for the remainder of his career. He was killed in a car accident on December 27, 2006.[1]
Hammer founded the Rutgers University Center for Operations Research, and created and edited the journals Discrete Mathematics, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Discrete Optimization, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Annals of Operations Research, and SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications.[1]
Publications
Hammer's publications include 19 books and over 240 papers. They include:
- 1968. Boolean Methods in Operations Research and Related Areas (with S. Rudeanu). SpringerVerlag, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, 1968, 330 pages.
- 2007. Boolean Functions: Theory, Algorithms and Applications (with Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- 2008. Boolean Functions in Computer Science and Engineering (with Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press. 2008.
- 2009. Boolean Functions in Pure and Applied Mathematics (with Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- 2010. PseudoBoolean Functions (with E. Boros and Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Awards and honors
In 1966, as a recent doctorate, Hammer won the "Gheorghe "Țițeica" prize of the Romanian Academy of Science. He became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1974. In 1986 he was given his first honorary doctorate, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; subsequently, he was given two more, by the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1998 and the University of Liège in 1999. He also won the Euler Medal of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications in 1999, and was a founding fellow of the institute.[1]
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Peter L. Hammer", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
- ↑ Peter Ladislaw Hammer (Dec. 23, 1936 – Dec. 27, 2006), RUTCOR, retrieved 2013-11-17.
- ↑ Boros, Endre; Crama, Yves; de Werra, Dominique; Hansen, Pierre; Maffray, Frédéric (2011), "The mathematics of Peter L. Hammer (1936–2006): graphs, optimization, and Boolean models", Annals of Operations Research, 188: 1–18, doi:10.1007/s10479-011-0913-4, MR 2823186.
- ↑ Boros, E.; Crama, Y.; Simeone, B. (2007), "Peter L. Hammer (1936–2006)" (PDF), 4OR, 5 (1): 1–4, doi:10.1007/s10288-007-0034-8
- ↑ Egon Balas, In Memoriam: Peter Hammer (1936–2006), ORMS, 2007-02-13, retrieved 2014-01-09.
- ↑ Peter L. Hammer at the Mathematics Genealogy Project