William Wesley Peterson (April 22, 1924 – May 6, 2009) was an American mathematician and computer scientist.

He was best known for designing the cyclic redundancy check (CRC),[1] for which research he was awarded the Japan Prize in 1999.

[2][3] Peterson was a professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, joining the faculty in 1964.

[4] In 2007, two years before Peterson's death, Intel added crc32 to the SSE4.2 instruction set of the x86-64 architecture.

[10] He died on May 6, 2009, in Honolulu, Hawaii survived by five children from two different marriages, his wife, and several grandchildren.