Peter Ladislaw Hammer: December 23, 1936-December 27, 2006

Peter Ladislaw Hammer was born in Timisoara, Romania, on December 23, 1936. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Bucharest in 1966. He defected to Israel in 1967 where he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa, and later moved to Canada, and taught at the University of Montreal (1969–1972), and at the University of Waterloo (1972–1983). In 1983, he moved to the USA and became a professor at Rutgers University, where he founded RUTCOR — the Rutgers Center for Operations Research. He remained the director of RUTCOR until his untimely death in a tragic car accident on December 27, 2006. For more than 40 years, Peter Hammer has ranked among the most influential researchers in the fields of operations research and discrete mathematics. He has made numerous major contributions to these fields, launching several new research directions. His results have influenced hundreds of colleagues and have made a lasting impact on many areas of mathematics, computer science, and statistics. Most of Peter Hammer’s scientific production has its roots in the work of George Boole on propositional logic. More than anyone else, Peter Hammer has used and extended Boole’smachina universalis to handle questions relating to decision making, analysis and synthesis as they arise in natural, economic and social sciences. Over the span of his scientific career, he has conducted eclectic forays into the interactions between Boolean methods, optimization, and combinatorial analysis, while adapting his investigations to the most recent advances of mathematical knowledge and of various fields of application. Among the main research topics which have received his attention, one finds an impressive array of methodological studies dealing with combinatorial optimization, some excursions into logistics and game theory, numerous contributions to graph theory, to the algorithmic aspects of propositional logic, to artificial