[2] Hayman was born in Cologne, Germany, the son of Roman law professor Franz Haymann (1874-1947) and Ruth Therese Hensel, daughter of mathematician Kurt Hensel.

Because of his Jewish heritage, he left Germany, then under Nazi rule, alone by train in 1938.

[5] In 1947, he married Margaret Riley Crann after they met at a Quaker meeting.

[8] He is known for his asymptotic results in Bieberbach conjecture in 1955,[9] and for Hayman's alternatives in Nevanlinna Theory.

[13] In 2008, an issue of the Journal Computational Methods and Function Theory was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday.