Peter Hammer

Peter Ladislaw Hammer, from time to time he published as Petru Ivanescu, ( born December 23, 1936 in Timişoara, † December 27, 2006 at Princeton, New Jersey ) is a Romanian- American mathematician who deals with combinatorics and Operations Research.

Life

Hammer studied at the University of Bucharest, where he was awarded a degree in 1958 and 1965 at Grigore Moisil doctorate (Pseudo- Boolean Programming and its Applications ). In 1961 he married Anca Ivanescu and took at that time temporarily their last name. With her he had two sons. In 1966 he was awarded the George Tzitzeica price of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. In 1967 he went with his wife to Israel, where he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa. In 1969 he went to Canada as a professor at the University of Montreal ( he was also a Canadian citizen ). In 1972 he moved to a professorship at the University of Waterloo and in 1983 at the Rutgers University. He became a U.S. citizen and founded at Rutgers University Rutgers University Center for Operations Research ( Rutcor ). He also played an important role to bring DIMACS at Rutgers University. He died in 2006 in a car accident near Princeton.

He is known for fundamental contributions to the theory of Boolean functions, and pursued their application in many areas (graph theory, integer programming, operations research). He turned to pseudo - Boolean functions even in data mining and data analysis (Logical Data Analysis, LDA ). He was the author or editor of 19 books and over 240 scientific papers.

In 1998 he was awarded the Euler Medal with Anthony JW Hilton. He was co-editor of Discrete Mathematics, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Discrete Optimization, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Annals of Operations Research and of SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications. He was an honorary doctorate from the ETH in Lausanne, the University of Rome (La Sapienza ) and the University of Liège. He was a founding member of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications, and he was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Writings

• Pseudo Boolean Programming and its Applications, Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol 9, 1965
• With S. Rudeanu Boolean Techniques for Bivalent Programming, Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Volume 14, 1966
• With S. Rudeanu Boolean Methods in Operations Research and Related Areas, Springer Verlag, 1968 ( French translation Dunod 1970)
• With Y. Crama Boolean Functions: Theory, Algorithms and Applications, Cambridge University Press 2007
• With Y. Crama Boolean Functions in Computer Science and Engineering, Cambridge University Press 2008
• With Y. Crama Boolean Functions in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Cambridge University Press 2009
• With E. Boros, Y. Crama pseudo - Boolean Functions, Cambridge University Press 2010