Peter Hammer

Peter L. 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.

Biography

Peter Ladislaw Hammer was born in Timişoara (Romania) in 1936. He earned his PhD. from the University of Bucharest, under the supervision of Grigore Moisil.

He married Anca Ivănescu in 1961. In 1967, he escaped with her to Israel, where he became professor at Technion, Haifa. In 1969 moved to Canada where he taught at Montreal University and Waterloo University. In 1983, he settled in the United States and became Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He died from a car accident on December 27, 2006, near Princeton, New Jersey.

Peter Hammer was founder and director of RUTCOR (Rutgers University Center for Operations Research).

He was founder and chief-editor of several internationally renowned journals dedicated to optimization, such as Discrete Mathematics, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Discrete Optimization, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Annals of Operations Research, SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications.

Peter Hammer was internationally acknowledge as an influent researcher. He received honorary degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (1986), University of Rome La Sapienza (1998), University of Liege (1999). He was also granted the "George Tzitzeica" prize of the Romanian Academy of Science (1966), and the Euler Medal of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (1999). He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1974, and a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. Several conferences were dedicated to him, including the First International Colloquium on Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (Chexbres, Switzerland, 1987), the Workshop and Symposia Honoring Peter L. Hammer (Caesarea Rothchild Institute, University of Haifa, 2003) and the International Conference on Graphs and Optimization (GO V, Leukerbad, Switzerland, 2006).

He was father of two sons, and grandfather of four.

Work

Peter Hammer was a prolific and influential researcher in the fields of operations research and discrete mathematics. He dedicated most of his work to the study of pseudo-Boolean functions (functions from $\{0,1\}^n$ to $R$) and their connections with optimisation. He is considered the father of the Boolean Function Theory as well as the main contributor to it, as his books testify. He also applied the techniques he developed to graph theory [ [http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sanders/graphtheory/people/random.cgi?Hammer,+Peter+L. Peter Hammer's publications in Graph Theory ] ] and integer programming.

More recently, he extended his work on pseudo-Boolean functions toward data mining and proposed the Logical Analysis of Data (LAD) methodology. He registered several successes with this method essentially to help medical diagnosis ["Logical Analysis of Data: From Combinatorial Optimization toMedical Applications." Annals of Operations Research 148, 2006, 203-225 (with Tiberius Bonates).] .

Publications

His publications include 19 books and over 240 papers. [When he was asked which of his paper was his favorite, he always answered "the last one".] A selection:
* 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, forthcoming (2007).
* 2008. "Boolean Functions in Computer Science and Engineering" (with Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (2008).
* 2009. 'Boolean Functions in Pure and Applied Mathematics" (with Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (2009).
* 2010. "PseudoBoolean Functions" (with E. Boros and Y. Crama). Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (2010).

References

External links

* [http://rutcor.rutgers.edu/peterhammer.html Biography]
* [http://rutcor.rutgers.edu/plh_publications.pdf Publications] "