He is also known as the co-author of Constrained Hamiltonian Systems[3] and of Gravitation, Gauge Theories, and Differential Geometry,[4] which attempted to bridge the gap between theoretical physicists and mathematicians at a time when concepts relevant to the two disciplines were rapidly unifying.

Hanson was born at Los Alamos where his father, son of Norwegian immigrant homesteaders, spent his first postdoctoral years as a nuclear physicist[7] working on the Manhattan Project.

[9][10][11] His family was on their way back to the United States from his father's sabbatical year in Torino, Italy, working with Gleb Wataghin on the post-war recovery of the Italian nuclear physics program.

As a high-school student in Urbana, IL, he wrote the core real-time multi-user CDC 1604 operating system used for the PLATO automated teaching project.

He worked briefly at the Exploratorium for Frank Oppenheimer, was employed in the Silicon Valley software industry, and then joined the machine vision group of the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center in 1980.