Robert Hecht-Nielsen
American computer scientist (1947–2019)
Robert Hecht-Nielsen (July 18, 1947 – May 25, 2019) was an American computer scientist, neuroscientist, entrepreneur and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He co-founded HNC Software Inc. (NASDAQ: HNCS) in 1986 which went on to develop the pervasive card fraud detection system, Falcon®. He became a vice president of R&D at Fair Isaac Corporation when it acquired the company in 2002.
Education and career
Hecht-Nielsen was born in San Francisco, California to a Danish immigrant father and an American mother. His family moved to Denver, Colorado when he was eight until his college years. Hecht-Nielsen studied at University of Colorado Denver before moving to Arizona State University, where he completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in anthropology in 1971 and his doctoral degree in mathematics in 1974 with a thesis topic on functional analysis. He worked at Motorola from 1979 to 1983, and at TRW from 1983 to 1986. In 1985, he became an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at University of California, San Diego. In 1986, Hecht-Nielsen and his business partner Todd Gutschow founded HNC Software Inc.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7345367. VIAF identifies the subject as 34564235. The Library of Congress control number is n88246195. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 2019, 1986 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Hecht-Nielsen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.