Peter Hammer - Biography

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, they defected to Israel, where he became professor at Technion, Haifa. In 1969 moved to Canada where he taught at McGill University and University of Waterloo. 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 acknowledged 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 Liège (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 five.