Hammer was born in
Timișoara,
Romania, He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the
University of Bucharest, earning a diploma in 1958 For a while in the 1960s he published under the name of Petru L. Ivănescu. In 1967, he and his wife (Anca Ivănescu) escaped Romania and defected to
Israel. Hammer taught at the
Technion from 1967 to 1969, then moved to Canada at
McGill University in
Montreal from 1969 to 1972, at the
University of Waterloo from 1972 to 1983, and finally at
Rutgers University in
New Brunswick, New Jersey for the remainder of his career. He was killed in a car accident on December 27, 2006. Hammer founded the Rutgers University Center for Operations Research, and created and edited the journals
Discrete Mathematics,
Discrete Applied Mathematics,
Discrete Optimization,
Annals of Discrete Mathematics,
Annals of Operations Research, and
SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications. == Publications ==