William Charles Hoffman
William Hoffman passed away on January 16, 2013. Born in 1919 in Portland, Oregon, Hoffman graduated from Lincoln High School, where he received the T.T Davis Award for outstanding scholar.
He graduated with a mathematics degree and earned his PhD in mathematics and statistics in 1953 from the University of California at Berkeley. His first job was in the Radio Propagation Division of the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory. He then worked at the Rand Corporation, Hughes Research Laboratories, and the ONR Probability Project at Cornell University.
In the early 1960s, Hoffman joined the staff at Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories, and, from there, followed his interest in pattern recognition, which he developed while attending the XIVth General Assembly of the International Scientific Radio Union in Tokyo as an official U.S. delegate. He eventually changed his area of research to mathematical psychology.
In 1966, Hoffman published his research on the lie transformation group of neuropsychology, which was his trademark. It wasn’t until 1985 that he went to work at New Mexico State University and later became the principal senior scientist at DynCorp in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
Hoffman was internationally known for his work in mathematical psychology, radio propagation, and statistical methodology for radio wave propagation. He published more than 60 research papers and books, and his final article, “Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology,” appeared in the journal Mathematics for BioMatics.
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