Hammer Peter Ladislau

December 23, 1936, Timișoara - December 27, 2006, Princeton, New Jersey

Mathematician. Founder and director of the institute Rutcor

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Peter Hammer

Peter L. Hammer was born in Timișoara into a Jewish family. His mother Elizabeth, born Schwartz, died when the child was 6 years old. At the age of two and a half, Peter fell ill with polio and survived. His father, Gheorghe Hammer (1911-1985) remarried Ana (Annie), born Kincs, when Peter was 10 years old and since then Annie has been his mother, together with his aunt Ilus Hammer.

After graduating from high school in Timișoara, he went to Bucharest, where he graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Bucharest in 1958 and obtained his doctorate in 1965 with the work "Pseudo-Boolean Programming and Applications" under the guidance of Professor Grigore Moisil.

In 1961 he married Anca Ivănescu and in the following years he published under the name Petru L. Ivănescu, until the moment when the family managed to emigrate illegally in 1967 to Israel through Bulgaria and Turkey. In Israel he taught at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and had collaborations at the Weizman Institute of Science in Rehovot. In 1969 he emigrated to Canada, where he taught at the University of Montreal (1969-1972) and the University of Waterloo (1972-1983). In 1983 he was offered to set up a research institute at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

He died in a car accident on December 27, 2006 near Princeton, New Jersey. He left behind his wife, Anca Hammer, two sons, Maxim (neurologist) and Alexander (economist), five grandchildren, mother, Annie Hammer and sister Eva Liebermann.

Scientific activity

He was the founder and director of the institute RUTCOR (Rutgers University Center for Operations Research) He was the founder and editor-in-chief of many specialized magazines: „Discrete Mathematics”, „Discrete Applied Mathematics”, „Annals of Discrete Mathematics”, „Discrete Optimization”, „Annals of Operations Research”, „SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications”.

He had outstanding contributions in the field of operational research and discrete applied mathematics by studying pseudo-Boolean functions and their connections with graph theory and data extraction. Among other contributions, Peter Hammer invented a modern and efficient method of data mining, called Logical Analysis of Data (LAD) which has been applied in many fields.

Peter L. Hammer was an outstanding, innovative, inexhaustible professor and scientist, and an exceptional organizer. He had a charismatic personality, he was a good man and full of humor, generous, attentive and understanding with colleagues and students. A loving husband, father and grandfather, devoted to the education and guidance of sons and grandsons.

Affiliations, awards and distinctions

  • The Țițeica Award of the Romanian Academy (1966)
  • Doctor honoris causa: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (1986), "La Sapienza", Università di Roma (1998), University of Liège (1999)
  • Medalia Euler (1999)
  • Fellow of „American Association for the Advancement of Science” since 1974
  • Founding Fellow of „Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications”
  • Congresses and symposia were dedicated to him, e.g.: First International Colloquium on Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (Chexbres, Elveția, 1987); Workshop and Symposia Honoring Peter L. Hammer (Caesarea Rothschild Institute, University of Haifa, 2003; International Conference on Graphs and Optimization (GO V, Leukerbad, Switzerland, 2006).

Publications

He has published 19 books and over 240 articles. A selection:

  • 1968. Boolean Methods in Operations Research and Related Areas (cu S. Rudeanu). SpringerVerlag, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, 1968, 330 pagini.
  • 2007. Boolean Functions: Theory, Algorithms and Applications (cu Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, (2007).
  • 2008. Boolean Functions in Computer Science and Engineering (cu Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, (2008).
  • 2009. Boolean Functions in Pure and Applied Mathematics (cu Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, (2009).
  • 2010. PseudoBoolean Functions (cu E. Boros și Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, (2010).

Sources

Biography Hammer

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hammer.html