Alfred Washington Hales (born November 30, 1938) is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the namesakes of the Hales–Jewett theorem.
[1] As an undergraduate, Hales was a two-time Putnam Fellow for the California Institute of Technology, in 1958 and 1959.
[4] From 1992 to 2003, he was director of the IDA Center for Communications Research in La Jolla, California.
They motivated their theorem as a form of game theory: it shows that certain high-dimensional generalizations of tic tac toe cannot have any tied positions.
[7] In 1971, Hales shared the George Pólya Prize with Ronald Graham, Klaus Leeb, Bruce Lee Rothschild, and Robert I. Jewett, for their work in Ramsey theory.