John Michael Hammersley (1920-2004)

Abstract

In writing this biographical memoir of John Hammersley, we have tried to communicate something of the character of the person, and of the impact of his scientific achievements across lattice models (for example, percolation, self-avoiding walks, first-passage percolation, dimer models), stochastic processes (including subadditive ergodic theory), Monte Carlo methods, applied probability, statistics, and other areas to which he contributed. There is also an extended account of his earlier life, taken from autobiographical notes written around 1994, together with a list of his published work.