Thomas Nathaniel Hibbard was born onMarch 14, 1929, and died on February 11, 2016.

He was an American mathematician and computer scientist.

He received the B.S. degree in physics from Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR, in 1951, his M.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1954, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1966.

He was a Scientific Programmer at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, programming the JOHNNIAC, from 1955 to 1958, an early computer built by Rand, and from 1959 to 1965 a member of the research staff of the System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, where he worked with Seymour Ginsburg and Joseph Ullian in automata theory and formal languages.

He spent 3yrs as visiting faculty appointment at the Catholic University of Salta, Argentina, he joined the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 1970.

Thomas managed research in searching, sorting, and data structures, helping to pioneer the field of analysis of algorithms.

Thomas started research with his then faculty colleague Armin B. Cremers, in 1974, initiating the theory and applications of data spaces.

In February 1976, Hibbard joined the staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, working on the Voyager, IRAS and Galileo projects until his retirement from JPL in 1986.

During that time, Hibbard joined the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), Marina del Rey, CA, and did experimental research on parallel computing until 1989, when he returned to Salta, Argentina, to teach at the National University (UNSA).

Thomas N. Hibbard passed away at 86 yrs old.